In 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers launched the first hot-air balloon, France succumbed to collective madness

In 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers launched the first hot-air balloon, France succumbed to collective madness. The question arose at once: might one put people in it? People were, at first, thought too great a risk, and a duck, a cockerel and a sheep were placed in the basket instead. The flight took place before the Palace of Versailles, under the eyes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The sheep landed alive and, by all accounts, perfectly unperturbed. The cockerel, it is true, broke a wing, but it emerged that the same sheep had kicked him before the flight even began.

The public was delighted. The newspapers wrote of the animals as heroes. The court discussed their characters.

But that is not even the strangest part. At the same time a fashion arose for miniature balloons. They were launched indoors, at balls and suppers. Little globes with a lighted candle inside floated beneath the ceiling, and ladies in powdered horsehair wigs and pomade found themselves in the immediate vicinity of a naked flame. Fires occurred regularly.

The French government was obliged to issue an official ban on launching balloons without police permission, because peasants in the provinces, seeing a burning object fall from the sky, took it for a dragon and attacked it with pitchforks