Profs and Pints Online presents: “Adventures of Victorian Aeronauts,” with Jennifer Tucker, associate professor of history and science in society at Wesleyan University and scholar of early balloon voyages.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Many of us today take for granted the idea that we can sit in a plane high over the earth and gaze out over the clouds. In the past, however, the vast “ocean of air” above our heads of was an unreachable and unknown quantity, a place to look up at rather than move through.

Our pioneering journeys off into the skies came with the first balloon ascents in the late 18th century. Suddenly, it became possible to look down on the world from above, enabling people to survey much more of the earth than they ever had been able to see from mountainsides.

Balloon flight opened up to us a host of other new possibilities: Scientists now had a new means to study the atmosphere, with the science of meteorology being established by Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer who used balloon ascents to conduct his research. Entrepreneurs turned balloons into popular entertainment, with the French aeronaut Madame Blanchard launching fireworks from them and the American aerialist Leona Dare performing stunts while suspended beneath them.  Military applications also became important, with balloons being used for battlefield reconnaissance in the American Civil War.

What did people take away from their quest for new views? How did these views inspire and educate? How did ballooning transform ideas of people and places? Hear such question tackled in a discussion of ballooning’s early days by Professor Jennifer Tucker, who has extensively researched this chapter of aviation history, especially focusing on the ascent of James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell, the inspiration for the 2019 movie The Aeronauts. As the author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, she will tap into an especially keen awareness of how ballooning transformed our understanding of not only the physical environment but also of the people and places below.

You’ll come to see broad support and understanding was essential to the success of the nineteenth-century balloon ascents and the scientific advances they brought.  And you’ll find yourself joining in the enthusiasm for aeronautical adventure, which reflects a deep human curiosity about the unknown combined with our fascination with risky behavior. You’ll love being along for this scholarly ride.

Profs & Pints Online: Adventures of Victorian Aeronauts