The ambiguity of our response to the Chinese spy balloon reflects the fact that from the time of the very first hot air balloon flights in France and England, air balloons combined elements of scientific research, surveillance, and entertainment in ways that still inform our contemporary notions.
When the first hydrogen balloon took off, unmanned, in Paris in August 1793, its appearance in the sky was so terrifying to spectators that when it descended in a field some miles away it was attacked and destroyed by local villagers. Only a few months later, the Roberts brothers, accompanied by scientist Jacques Charles, successfully launched a manned flight from the Tuileries garden that flew 36 kilometers and carried a barometer and thermometer to gather meteorological information. A reported 400,000 people, including Benjamin Franklin, gathered to watch the expedition. This combination of scientific information gathering and popular entertainment would continue to characterize ballooning. Many popular balloonists were scientists or photographers who also became showmen, funding their ascents and supporting themselves through talks and writings about their journeys.
The Chinese government’s claim that its errant balloon was simply gathering weather data follows a long tradition of meteorological study using balloons. In England, one of the most famous meteorological aeronauts was James Glaisher, author of Travels in the Air (1871). A founding member of the Meteorological Society, Glaisher made a number of ascents to gather data about temperature and humidity at various altitudes. His experiences were dramatic enough to have become, somewhat improbably, the subject of a 2019 film, The Aeronauts, based on Richard Holmes’s 2013 book Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. The most famous image from Glaisher’s book shows the moment when he lost consciousness due to altitude, nearly bringing his voyage to catastrophe. Most of the book’s illustrations, however, focus on depicting cloud formations, shooting stars, and other meteorological or astronomical phenomena that he observed.
Balloons offered a unique opportunity for surveillance long before airplanes were invented. They were used for military spying by France in the Franco-Austrian War, and by both sides in the U.S. Civil War. Even in civilian contexts, balloons provided an entirely new perspective that could not have been seen before – panoramic surveys of landscape formations, the layout of cities, and other aspects of topography. Glaisher noted that from his balloon, the scenery appeared flattened, “and the whole country appears like a prodigious map spread out beneath [one’s] feet.” Looking down at London, he can see where the large buildings of the city proper dissolve into the smaller homes of the suburbs, finally becoming the countryside, like a garden outside a home. Henry Mayhew, whose groundbreaking urban study London Labour and the London Poor (1849-50) is remarkable for its geographical specificity, noted in an 1852 account that the “peculiar panoramic effect” of balloon travel allows for unmatched views of the city. He is able to see London’s constituent parts “like little coloured plaster models of countries”: its roadways striping the land, the multiple bridges over the Thames, the line of the South-Western Railway cutting across the meadows.