On 16 December 1784 – barely a year after the first crewed flight – a British cartoonist published a sketch entitled The Battle of the Balloons, depicting airships belonging to the leading powers of the day firing cannons at each other from among the clouds.
In his book Falling Upwards, Richard Holmes adduces the drawing as evidence of the intimate relationship between balloons and military competition, with, for instance, the first French company of aeronauts formed on the remarkably early date of 29 March 1794.
Today we might contemplate another point Holmes makes: “Balloons are also ancient and symbolic devices [with] a long history, and a longer mythology, going back in various forms and dimensions thousands of years, to ancient civilisations in South America and China.”
Perhaps that long symbolic resonance explains something about the otherwise baffling battle of balloons raging in our 21st century skies.
US defence personnel now say they have downed four mysterious objects floating across America and Canada over the last week. A spokesperson for the state department blamed China for flying balloons over “more than 40 countries across five continents”; China’s foreign ministry countered by claiming to to have detected 10 US balloons in its airspace since January 2022.
The US and China both control hundreds of spy satellites. These high-tech surveillance systems suck up communications data at whim, generate images so precise as to reveal details of clothing, cracks in the pavement and rubbish on the ground, and classify information in real time using the latest iterations of AI.
Once launched, they’re almost impossible to circumvent – and so, for the most part, both sides respond to constant orbital scrutiny by pretending (at least publicly) that it doesn’t exist.
Why, then, the sudden concern about a technology developed in the 18th century?
In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers launched a balloon emblazoned with the cipher of Louis XVI, carrying skyward a sheep, duck and a cockerel (all three later hailed as “heroes of the air”) before a huge crowd at the Palace of Versailles.
The display might not have saved Louis from the guillotine a few years later but it established a relationship between lighter-than-air flight and state power, reinforced when Napoleon celebrated his coronation by sending aloft a silk-draped balloon carrying a huge imperial crown on golden chains.
Yet shortly after the Montgolfier demonstration, Prof Jacques Charles and the brothers Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis Robert launched the first hydrogen balloon in central Paris. It landed in the village of Gonesse – where the peasants destroyed it with pitchforks.
If balloons could awe the masses, they could also, it seemed, enrage them.
On 18 December 1856 Sydney newspapers advertised that a certain Pierre Maigre, “of aerial fame in France, US, East Indies, Mauritius and other places”, intended to “climb to the heavens” in what would be Australia’s first balloon flight.
But when Maigre attempted to inflate his craft before a huge crowd of paying spectators on the Domain, the slowness of the process so bored the onlookers that, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, some “four thousand boys and youths, with yells and hootings, [went] flying after the unfortunate aeronaut, who, however, succeeded in making his escape, not exactly in so trim a guise as that in which he had appeared in public”.
The crowd then began chanting, “The balloon! The balloon! Burn the balloon,” a task they soon accomplished.
The Domain balloon riot (a “scene of wanton mischief such as we never wish to behold again”, the SMH said), delayed the first successful Australian flight until February 1858, when George Coppin engaged Joseph Dean and Charles Henry Brown to launch a balloon in Cremorne in Melbourne.
Only two weeks later, when Brown attempted a second flight, he reported how when he descended “on the road between Collingwood stockade and Brunswick”, he was “treated in the most brutal manner by the people ascended … they tore the hair from my head, bruised, pushed and almost suffocated me, besides damaging the balloon by tugging at trampling on it”.
In 1864 the famed aeronaut Henry Coxwell received even rougher treatment in Leicester, England, when rumours spread among the 50,000 spectators watching his ascent that he was palming them off with an older, smaller balloon. The crowd turned on Coxwell and, when he abandoned the flight, attacked him, chanting, according to one newspaper, “Rip him up,” “Knock him on the head” and “Finish him.”
Once again the balloon was burnt, with its remains paraded triumphantly through the town.
The hostility sometimes shown to Victorian aeronauts clearly stemmed from the class polarisations of the era.
But the balloons themselves made tempting targets for popular wrath because of the way they combined the sublime and the profane. They soared high above ordinary men and women and yet could be so easily reduced to their flimsy, prosaic components.
Perhaps there’s something similar in the current crisis.
The most important spy technology remains, by its nature, almost entirely invisible.
Yet, unlike a satellite, the first balloon shot down by the Americans could be seen by the naked eye – and as such provided a public, palpable focus for the tensions between the US and China.
Once it became visible, escalation seemed inevitable.
Holmes says ballooning enables “the most enduring early dream of flying”, which he describes as fundamentally metaphysical.
“The ultimate purpose is,” he says, “to fly as high as possible, and then look back upon the earth and see mankind for what it really is.”
In that spirit, what does the balloon crisis reveal?
Fairly obviously, it shows that polarisation between the superpowers has reached such a level of tension that confrontations could break out over issues that no one saw coming.
• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist
