Technical and scientific labour in the flights of Jeffries and Blanchard

Though Jeffries and Blanchard are often discussed together in the histories of ballooning, it is important to remain mindful of the differences that existed between the two men and their aims in flying together. Jeffries paid Blanchard a hundred guineas, making Blanchard in Jeffries's eyes an employee, but in Blanchard's eyes rendering Jeffries a customer of his burgeoning balloon business. Blanchard was to be in charge of every technical aspect of the flight and its control (as far as the men believed controlled flight to be possible), and Jeffries would be taken aloft for the experience and to conduct his experiments on the nature of atmospheric air.Footnote ¹⁰

My emphasis here is on Jeffries, for two reasons: first, because he is the author of the text; second, because greater attention has historically been paid to Blanchard as a pioneer balloonist, rather than to Jeffries as a pioneer philosopher of ballooning and of the upper terrestrial atmosphere. Blanchard is arguably the more interesting historical character. He was one of the first balloonists to turn experimental flight into a profitable career; he toured Europe; he was imprisoned in Austria following his fourty-fourth flight in 1792, on suspicion that he was spreading the ideas of the French Revolution; and he pioneered ballooning in North America before an audience including George Washington and John Adams.

Jeffries's ambitions for ballooning were neither as entrepreneurial nor as exciting as Blanchard's. His account of the flights they undertook together was written, initially, for an unusually restricted audience for the popular practice of ballooning – the Royal Society – and so can reveal the strategies through which an early advocate of ballooning as a scientific practice attempted to win over a group of sceptical natural philosophers. It also reveals an approach to ballooning that was based on existing scientific and technical practices, and sought to subsume the novelty of ballooning into a natural-philosophical history.

Jeffries's outlook on the utility of balloons was broadly optimistic and embraced the as yet indeterminate status of ballooning as a virtue that would encourage its greater adoption. Because aerial navigation was ‘still but in its infancy’, he wrote, ‘every new experiment can hardly fail of helping, in some degree, to improve and bring it forward towards that state of perfection, at which it may be reduced to a certain system, and to regular and practical rules and directions for every part of it’.Footnote ¹¹ The ultimate aim of a regulated practice of ballooning was clear in Jeffries's eyes, even if the means by which his idealized system of ‘practical rules’ might be attained was less so. The practice Jeffries had in mind becomes clear in the set of philosophical points of investigation to which he believed balloonists were uniquely positioned to respond:

Jeffries's list shows his belief in the broad potential for the experimental uses of balloons. The list mixes investigation into the mechanics of directed flight with other experimental aims to discover the nature of the Earth's atmosphere. The first and second points are inquiries into the function of a balloon, the second and third into weather and atmosphere. Was the balloon itself a subject of experimentation, or a site for scientific discovery in the flights with Blanchard? Jeffries may not have considered there to be a difference between these categories, but his employment of Blanchard to manage the technical aspects of the flight suggests that he was aware that different forms of knowledge and experience were involved in and generated by balloon flight.

The clarity that Jeffries demonstrates about his ambitions for ballooning can also be read as a response to a pervasive suspicion of novelty and curiosity in elite circles of British natural philosophy. Historian Nicholas Thomas's description of the origins of this suspicion outlines exactly the tone of childish excitement that Jeffries must have been eager to avoid. He writes that

By articulating his serious aims, and, as we shall see, the means by which accurate measurements would be taken, Jeffries attempted to move ballooning from a novel curiosity into the realm of scientific study, and to legitimize ballooning as a philosophical pursuit. Thomas has also highlighted the ways in which curiosity was often linked to the vanities and superficiality of commerce, another area from which Jeffries was keen to show his distance, by contrast with his professional balloonist companion, Blanchard. The fact that Jeffries details the money he spent on securing his place on the flights is evidently meant to assure the reader of the lack of commercial interest he held in flight, and to assure us that his motives were purely philosophical. This reassurance is not entirely successful, however, as it has the potential to transform Jeffries into a frivolous consumer of novelty rather than a serious man of science. Jeffries, throughout his Narrative, employs an impartial rhetoric to insist on scientific curiosity as his motivation, as opposed to the novelty, fame and fortune that ballooning also seemed to promise.

As was common both in other accounts of ballooning and in other travel documents of the period, Jeffries provides a list of equipment necessary for scientific investigation during flight:

As with many instrument descriptions of the period, the names of the makers in Jeffries's list acted as guarantees for the precision of the instruments.Footnote ¹⁵ Jeffries name-drops heavily when he mentions the gift bestowed upon him by Henry Cavendish, which is clearly meant to increase the philosophic standing of his atmospheric investigations. Jeffries participates in what Michael Bravo has described as a growing discourse of precision in the late eighteenth century, whereby suspicion of superficial motivations for adventurous travel could be allayed through precise measurement taking. As Bravo demonstrates, the meaning (and value) of precision for the scientific traveller ‘rested on reliable habits of work’, including literary style as a form of precise measurement:

Jeffries's account was itself a testament to his precision, his conformity to scientific values and expectations of the day. His writing style is descriptive in ways which stimulate the reader's imagination concerning the more exciting aspects of balloon flight, but is also attentive to details such as the measurements of thermometer, barometer and electrometer at regular intervals, which he uses to assure the reader of the value of his work and the legitimate reasons for his interest in ballooning.

By far the most popular item of philosophic equipment to take on balloon flights was the barometer. The principles of atmospheric pressure that had been established by Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century remained the balloonist's best way of determining the relative height of the balloon from the earth, especially when immersed in a haze of cloud. As the effect of atmospheric pressure on mercury had since been rationalized into a portable barometrical instrument, the visual indications of upwards or downwards motion were clear to read: the barometer's quicksilver fell as the balloon rose, and rose as the balloon fell. This instrument had sufficient symbolic value that Jeffries chose to pose beside one in his portrait, to demonstrate his philosophic nature and interests. A print, derived from an etching of the portrait, forms the frontispiece to Jeffries's Narrative. His pose, in the basket of a balloon, clothed in an extravagant fur hat and gesturing to his barometer, makes clear that the image he wished to convey was that of an adventurous, but thorough, man of science.Footnote ¹⁷

Jeffries remarked upon the uselessness of electrometers as additions to the scientific baggage of ballooning, and was shocked to find that the compass he had brought along was unable to help him navigate above the clouds without a point of terrestrial reference. Charles Withers, in his history of geographical knowledge production during the European Enlightenment, highlights that ‘the facts of instrument measurement are always geographically contingent: location makes a difference to the production of knowledge and to the contexts of its reception and justification’.Footnote ¹⁸ This is no more true of any situation in the Enlightenment than of ballooning. For the results of a philosophical balloonist to be deemed valuable by a scientifically interested bourgeois public (upon whose financial capital the balloonists’ endeavours depended) required a legitimation of the balloon as a location for scientific work. Once more we see how the balloon was both the subject of investigation and a means of travelling to new atmospheric heights for philosophical inquiry.

Jeffries's text begins with an apology for the delay between the flights of late 1784 and early 1785, and the appearance of his pamphlet in 1786. In fact, the excuse he presents is a front by which to boast of the warm reception he felt his experiments received from Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Society, before whom he read his work on 14 April 1786. Further evidence for Jeffries's ambition to join the ranks of esteemed British natural philosophers can be found in his methods for ballooning and documenting balloon flight, as well as his presentation of results. To understand the methods by which he appealed to existing conventions of scientific discovery, we must first examine the perceived parallels between balloons and ships which Jeffries used to aid his efforts to legitimize balloon flight as a philosophic practice.

As Richard Sorrenson has demonstrated, ships such as Cook's Endeavour can be usefully conceived of as scientific instruments. Sorrenson has outlined three criteria by which a vehicle can become an instrument of natural philosophy: first, that a measure of authority derives from the type or maker of the craft; second, that traces of the vehicle itself remain in the record of the experimental voyage; and third, that the vehicle offers a ‘superior, self-contained and protected view’ of the landscapes and civilizations observed.Footnote ¹⁹ Jeffries attempted to guarantee his balloon according to all three of these criteria. First, the authority of Jeffries's voyage is derived from the practical experience and reputation of Blanchard as a balloonist. Second, the text of the account makes explicit the voyager's experience of the balloon-vehicle. Third, the ‘superiority’ of the view of landscapes and civilizations is neatly demonstrated by Jeffries's reference to the citizens of London who ‘as we ascended, gradually diminished to our view into mere pigmies’. Indeed, in this latter statement Jeffries seems to have taken upon himself the task of anthropological research into the state of the British population when observed from the new aerial view, as if he were part of a colonizing effort from the skies.

In addition to the neatness with which the balloon in Jeffries's account satisfies Sorrenson's criteria, it is important to note that there existed a technical reason behind the balloon–ship analogy often used in the period. Air was frequently described as a fluid in the period and the desire to devise a navigational system for ballooning provoked a sudden rush of authors claiming that the air acted in a manner that was comparable, if not identical, to water. This suited Jeffries well because of the high importance placed on ships and maritime travel by the Royal Society on account of the exciting observations and specimens that they yielded.

Amongst such voyages, those of Cook and Banks provided Jeffries with successful literary models upon which to base his Narrative.Footnote ²⁰ The full manuscript of Cook's journal of the voyage of the Endeavour was not published until 1893. The version available to Jeffries and his contemporaries was an amalgamation of the various texts written on British voyages to the southern hemisphere, compiled by the English author and editor John Hawkesworth, who ‘embellished’ the text as he saw fit. His justification for doing so sheds light on the practices of a successful editor in the period, attempting to prepare a manuscript of travel writing for a broad commercial audience:

Without directly criticizing the writings of Banks or Cook, Hawkesworth suggests that the combination of their manuscripts with his literary savoir faire provides an improvement on the dry outlines usually offered in unedited accounts. Jeffries did not have the publishing wisdom of Hawkesworth behind him, but his Narrative attempts to provide the shades of descriptive life and beauty praised by Hawkesworth, whilst adhering to an observational standard befitting a scientific account. Jeffries oscillates between ‘observing the variations of the other instruments, and of the majestic and extensive scene before us’, demonstrating how it is possible to experience the joy of exploration and of scientific research in the same voyage. In this manner, he apes the paradigm established for engaging and accurate accounts of exploratory voyages that were hugely successful in establishing valuable colonial territory for European powers. As Quilley has written of the reception of Cook's journals, ‘an ideal of detached, scientific curiosity was held to underpin voyages of exploration, and to authorize their reliability, through their representation textually, visually and through practices of collecting’.Footnote ²² Jeffries even adheres to the requirement of collecting specimens, capturing samples of air from high altitudes in vials.

Midway through Jeffries's account of the first voyage, a very palpable tension arises between his empirical duty to record ‘simple facts as they occurred’ and his desire to praise the city of London as the world's greatest metropolis. On page 19 of his account we read, ‘At this time the ships, &c. on the River Thames appeared like very small shallops [small boats used for coastal navigation] or canoes, in a narrow foggy creek’. The sentence strikes an odd tone, as it seems to belittle the river at the heart of London's trade network, and to make direct comparison between imperial British maritime technology and small indigenous North American boats. Two paragraphs later, however, we are given a much more favourable and generous description of what Jeffries imagines he would have seen, had the November weather been better,

In Jeffries's work, the analogy between ships and balloons presented an opportunity to garner funding and prestige for ballooning via established networks of science, and to distance ballooning from its growing reputation as a spectacular entertainment. Though Jeffries's intended audience for his pamphlet was likely to have been wider than the Royal Society, there can be little doubt that that institution represented a concentrated section of the society amongst which he wished to shore up his reputation.

The Scottish flights of Vincenzo Lunardi

Lunardi began his ballooning career in London, and used the experience to write one of the earliest accounts of balloon flight: An Account of the First Aerial Voyage in England (1784). Here, however, I hope to make the case for Lunardi as a pioneer of Scottish ballooning, and so will focus on his text An Account of Five Aerial Voyages in Scotland and the context of Enlightenment Edinburgh and Glasgow in which it was produced. Five Aerial Voyages is longer than his account of the flight in England, and contains less of Lunardi's characteristically verbose style, but the reasons for my focus on this work are not purely textual. Lunardi's reception in Scotland was much warmer than in the south of Britain, where cynicism frequently greeted his performances. The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (a London newspaper) wrote,

At the beginning of the book Lunardi himself singles out the enthusiasm of his Scottish friends in England as a prompt for his decision to pioneer balloon flight north of the border.Footnote ²⁵ Despite his rapid development of a monopoly on ballooning in Scotland, Lunardi is gracious throughout the text to his predecessor James Tytler, who successfully, if chaotically, launched a balloon from Edinburgh the year before Lunardi, and whose precedent will be discussed further on in this section.

Lunardi never declared the scientific aims for his flights that Jeffries did. Tiberius Cavallo, fellow of the Royal Society and author of a long work on The History and Practice of Aerostation, criticized him sternly for his purely ‘romantic observations’ and failure ‘to improve the subject of aerostation, or to throw light on any operation of nature’.Footnote ²⁶ For Cavallo, the utility of ballooning was undermined by the apparent laziness of balloonists such as Lunardi, who were interested only in their own sense of aesthetic pleasure during the flight.

It is relatively commonplace to argue for the importance of Adam Smith in the historical study of public culture in mid- to late eighteenth-century Britain, but Lunardi's practice of ballooning had particular links to the Scottish philosopher. It was no coincidence that Lunardi's career as a spectacular balloonist reached its peak in Edinburgh, ‘a centre of interest in scientific and intellectual matters’.Footnote ²⁷ In these flights by Lunardi, the combination of showmanship and philosophic investigation was at its most obvious, as the scientific community of Edinburgh took interest in the demonstrations of balloon flight alongside the usual mass of citizens.

Lunardi himself fostered particular connections to significant persons of the Scottish Enlightenment. The text of Five Aerial Voyages is dedicated to the aristocratic Highland reformer Henry Scott the Duke of Buccleuch and his wife Caroline, Baroness Greenwich.Footnote ²⁸ Scott (1746–1812) had received an initial education at Eton College before his stepfather, the English politician Charles Townshend, arranged for him to be privately tutored by the moral philosopher Adam Smith. Scott and Smith remained friends throughout their lifetimes, and though there is no evidence of Lunardi ever meeting Smith it is a close enough link to suggest that the balloonist would have been at least broadly aware of Smith's ideas and the status accorded to them by the intellectual Scottish society which Lunardi evidently wished to impress.

It makes some sense, then, to consider the position of ballooning, and the knowledge it generated, within the philosophical structure of Smith's works, and to note the ways in which Lunardi appealed to the governing ideals of his guardian's education.

Lunardi's text embodies a dialectical aspect of spectating and participating in balloon flights. His book contains witness reports and paper cuttings from observers of his flights, as well as his own recollections. The form of the book itself is therefore a representation of the two-way structure of observation and record making at work in the creation of aerostatic spectacle. The balloonist looked back at the crowd as they gazed up at him. Spectators and spectated were interlocked until distance, or cloud, broke the line of sight between them. Both the crowd and the balloonist collaborated in the creation of the spectacle, and in the provision of its historical record, and it is noteworthy that Lunardi includes newspaper accounts in his own account, to show his awareness of his own public reception.

Ideas put forward by Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) offer a way of theorizing this relationship through a contemporary understanding of human sentiments. Smith's work also helps us to historicize the political and social elements of balloon flight as a public spectacle, particularly in the instance of Lunardi's flights from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Smith emphasizes the role of the imagination in the creation of sympathy by claiming that one person can have no immediate experience of what is felt by another. It is rather

Once the balloon launches, the condition of the balloonist in the carriage is that of a ‘closed-setting’ environment, one that we outside the balloon (historians as well as spectators) can only access imaginatively. Smith's category of the imaginative spectator therefore seems a particularly apt way of conceptualizing the relationship between the isolated flying subject and his audience in terms proper to eighteenth-century moral philosophy. In particular, it allows identification with the bodily and emotional experience of flight by those who have yet to leave the ground, and humanizes what had – until this point – been only a mythical activity. The ‘have-not-yets’ of flight can, and must, imagine themselves in the place of the airborne ‘haves’ in order to sympathize, which is Smith's moral action that underpins civilized behaviour.

The line of sight between the balloonist and the crowd flowed in two directions. Lunardi's observations of the crowds that gathered to watch him fly provide a ‘bird's-eye view’ of late eighteenth-century urban Scottish society, just as their views of him record some of the first instances of human flight. The celebrated balloonist's main concern was to imagine the ways in which he was or would be perceived by the audience, which varied in size during the Scottish flights from twenty thousand to eighty thousand people. Lunardi's letters present him as the spectated subject imagining the views of his spectators, rather than giving a simple description of the appearance of the audience below.

In his Five Aerial Voyages Lunardi engages in an imaginatively sympathetic manner with his spectators even before their formation as a social group. When his plans to launch from George Square in Edinburgh are derailed by a local woman (a ‘Female MACHIAVEL’, as Lunardi bitterly describes her), he writes in distress to his guardian: ‘how shall I keep my engagements with the PUBLIC! Numbers of people shall come from GLASGOW and ABERDEEN and they must all be disappointed!’Footnote ³⁰ This anxiety tells us much about the purpose that Lunardi ascribed to his flight activities. It was in the interest of the public good that he wished to ascend, not only to entertain but to show gratitude for the public's interest in his labour and to act as an ambassador for aerostatic technology. Though this seems at odds with the experimental purposes of Jeffries, the position of the ‘man of science’ by the end of the eighteenth century (as exemplified by Benjamin Franklin) was thought to offer both material and spiritual benefits to the public through experimental performance.Footnote ³¹ Lunardi certainly liked to draw attention to the uplifting spiritual experience he believed his balloon offered and made much of his feelings of obligation to provide the public with a performance. When the weather conditions were less than ideal on the morning of his planned first flight from Edinburgh, the Lord Provost of the city offered to speak to the crowd and ensure the ‘indulgence of the public’ for Lunardi. But the balloonist declined the offer to postpone the launch, as his fear of disappointing ‘the public curiosity, which is now highly raised, has outweighed every other consideration’. He went on: ‘I determine at all events to ascend; hoping that some of the boats would take me up, in case my descent should be upon the ocean’.Footnote ³² That Lunardi was willing to risk drowning at sea in order to satisfy the waiting public seems unnecessarily extreme. Yet, as Lunardi made the decision to launch, the harmful consequences of an unsatisfactory aerial performance must have been fresh in his mind. A year earlier, James Tytler had won the accolade of being the first person in Britain to fly when he launched his ‘fire balloon’ in Edinburgh, but the flight had lasted only minutes and provoked public disappointment. Tytler's first-person account of the fate of the failed balloonist, which Lunardi included as an appendix in the Five Aerial Voyages, could explain Lunardi's staunch resolution to fly:

Tytler's attempts to relaunch his balloon and save face were thwarted when he was sued for damages caused to property by his earlier flights, and the authorities seized his balloon. The legal battle lasted for six months, ending only when a wealthy friend paid the damages on Tytler's behalf. Edinburgh was clearly a hostile place for those who were unable to substantiate their flight claims with a public demonstration. Perhaps it was with this precedent in mind that Lunardi reassured his guardian that he would be ‘attended by a good number of soldiers’ when he launched from Glasgow at the end of November 1785, and that ‘during the process of filling the Balloon, the Band of the Regiment will entertain the company with martial music’.Footnote ³⁴ The pomp of this military presence was meant to endow the event with an official air, but also to warn the crowd against mob behaviour in case of failure. Such a performance of military power must be understood in terms of the disciplinary signals it sends to a populace, even if it is superficially glossed – as it was by Lunardi – as an endorsement by those who rule.

The single crowd that the balloonist saw was an amalgamation of the different social classes, ages and genders that assembled for each launch of the hydrogen balloon in Scotland. Lunardi writes of how he is received by these different groups in terms that once more recall the ‘imaginative’ aspect of Smith's theory. His excitement at being the object of so many female gazes provokes the following verbose prediction in the days before his first Edinburgh flight:

The erotic nature of this fantasy is hard to miss, but was also part of the persona that Lunardi had created for himself as a dashing and courageous hero who performed his feats in the name of chivalry. Whilst he professes his desire to please all ‘ladies’ indiscriminately, he distinguishes between upper-middle- and working-class groups by aiming to fulfil the different obligations he feels to them. The ‘numbers of very respectable people’ who had gathered in the Garden of Herriott's Hospital by ten o'clock on the morning of 5 October could not be disappointed in their expectations, which were to see a man fly. Yet when his balloon lands in the Scottish countryside and he is taken to the nearest town, Lunardi recounts that ‘the lower ranks of people looked upon me as a kind of Superior BEING’, whilst the gentlemen of the town entertained him with an elegant supper.Footnote ³⁶ Lunardi's account of his treatment treads the line between deific tribute and bourgeois politesse according to the class status of those he encounters.

Ballooning created what was perhaps the most democratic assemblage that eighteenth-century urban British society could support short of anything approaching a revolutionary mob. The organization of the spectacle and attempt to profit by means of ticket sales was undermined by the ability to view the balloon from outside a ticketed area, as it rose into the sky. The ballooning practices of Lunardi were progressive in their financial organization, as they were funded by public subscription rather than by the traditional model of aristocratic patronage. This way of managing the considerable cost of a balloon launch bore political connotations, typified in Franz Mesmer's refusal of Marie Antoinette's patronage in favour of a public subscription.Footnote ³⁷

Records of how this crowd described the flights for themselves can be traced in newspaper and journal publications of the time and were quoted by Lunardi. A widely reproduced account of Lunardi's flight from Kelso states,

This account tells us a great deal about what it meant to see a human fly in a balloon and how challenging an event this was to convey in language. The apophasis in the declaration of descriptive impossibility suggests that something beyond the bounds of usual rhetorical range is occurring. It is not difficult to employ the imaginative principles of Smith and creatively sympathize with this subject, for whom the established boundaries between the tangible and the intangible had been ruptured as Lunardi ‘entered into the clouds’. Balloons were perceived as the property of the crowd that turned out to watch them, as well as of the balloonist who designed and flew them. Lunardi's account reminds us that the regular practice of ballooning was dependent on a sympathetic crowd who demanded the satisfaction of a spectacle in order to refrain from transforming into a mob.

Balloonists were not the first or only group of philosophic adventurers to travel upwards in search of both atmospheric and spiritual knowledge. The figure of the lone explorer above cloud level was a trope of an early Romantic obsession with mountaineering and this similarity meant that balloon flights were soon linked to a philosophy of transcendence, captured by the anonymously penned verse The Flying Mortal:

This satirical verse epitomizes a criticism of Romantic thought that it sees itself as superior in aspect to everything and everyone else. Alternating stanzas are concluded with different, but uniformly perjorative, descriptions of the left-behind multitude, choice examples being ‘grov'ling’, ‘stupid’ and ‘senseless’. Similarities in the practices and critiques of the early British balloonists and the later Romantics are numerous. Celebrated Romantic writers – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and William Wordsworth among them – were all mountaineers at some point and saw the activity as key to their literary identities. The history of mountaineering as an activity in the period displays a similar trajectory to that of ballooning, as commercial interests soon supplanted early scientific uses. Whilst the first known ascent of Ben Nevis (1771) was to collect botanical specimens, within a decade it had become a site of touristic interest, as had the peaks of the Lake District, where one could pay a guide to be taken to their summits.Footnote ⁴⁰

Lunardi undoubtedly capitalized on this emergent travel discourse. Indeed his decision to fly in Scotland can be seen as a savvy publicity move given the popularity of Highland tours in the period. Following Samuel Johnson and James Boswell's lead, wealthy English and lowland Scottish tourists began to visit rural and Highland Scotland. The natural-philosophic precedent was set by Joseph Banks's visits to the Western Isles in 1772, and continued in the lengthy books of Thomas Pennant, who toured the Highlands throughout the 1770s. There even existed another individual who shared Lunardi's interests in both ballooning and the landscape and people of Scotland. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond published his Voyage en Angleterre, en Ecosse et aux Iles Hebrides in 1797 and by 1799 it had been translated into English. A mixture of ethnography and geology, the book contributed to a popular discourse on the particular cultures of the British Isles. Prior to this, De Saint-Fond had written a two-volume Description de la machine aérostatique de MM. Montgolfier, published in 1783 and 1784, which positioned the author as a modern man of science, interested in disseminating the results of the Montgolfier experiments and tying his name to the emergent practice of balloon flight. The similarities between de Saint Fond and Lunardi are, of course, coincidental, but like most coincidences they suggest a shared social context in which interest in aerostatic flight and Highland culture and ecology were seen as compatible subjects. Frederik Jonsson's exceptional book on the culture of the Highland enclosures and the Scottish Enlightenment offers a fascinating way of conceiving of the attraction of the region to men like Lunardi and de Saint Fond. Jonsson writes of the Highland tours, ‘The pleasure of the experience was to a great degree temporal. Highland tours offered a time machine … Travellers felt themselves moving backward in time the farther into the region they penetrated.’Footnote ⁴¹

The balloon, in Lunardi's text, can also be conceived as a time machine in the way Jonsson describes. As it takes off from the urban sprawl of Edinburgh it rises until above the level of the clouds, descending on a completely different landscape of rural Fife. The contrast between these two locations in terms of their social and environmental arrangements must have seemed all the starker for the speed with which Lunardi moved between them. The most modern developments in atmospheric chemistry had allowed for the compressing of distance into a much shorter time than possible on horseback. The arrival of balloon flight must surely have felt like the beginning of a new age.

One final link between a peculiar branch of the Scottish establishment in the Enlightenment and Lunardi deserves our attention. On 11 October 1785 Lunardi writes to his guardian from Edinburgh that he has been made a member of ‘a very respectable society called the Knight's Companions of the Beggar's Benison’.Footnote ⁴² The Beggar's Benison was a club ‘devoted to the convivial and obscene celebration of the idea of free sex’, whose members convened in a club house on the Eastern Tip of Fife.Footnote ⁴³ Founded in 1732, the Benison had been known for its links to Jacobitism but, with the waning force of Scottish nationalism in the 1780s, the club was happy enough to accept even the Prince of Wales as a member. Elite members of Englightenment Scottish society participated in the club's rituals as members, and Lunardi is coy in his description of the Benison's purpose when he relays the news of his admission, remarking that it is a subject best conveyed ‘ad aures’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Other members of the club at the time of Lunardi's admission included Sir Thomas Dundas, Member of Parliament and later responsible for the commissioning of the Charlotte Dundas steamboat; Hugh Cleghorn, professor of civil and natural history at the University of St Andrews and later colonial secretary to Ceylon; and the aforementioned George, Prince of Wales. The Beggar's Benison was, as David Stevenson, historian of the Benison, describes, an institution which affirmed the bonds between its elite members through secret rituals of drinking and sexual capacity, rather than propagating the destruction of polite society. Excess in the Benison was a means of cohesive community formation, partaken of at a distance and in secret from Edinburgh society, but not intended as a radical challenge to the normative social structure, by which the Benison's members profited. Similar codes of behaviour are found in modern drinking societies at Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

In the letter sent to Lunardi informing him of his admission to the Benison, James Lumsdaine, ‘sovereign’ of the club, signs off with a wish that ‘the Beggar's Benison may ever attend such bold adventurers’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The label encapsulates much of Lunardi's cultivated self-image but reveals also the public's excitement at the opportunities for aerial exploration presented by the balloon. The skies were now available for human exploration, and, just as the discovery of new lands by European powers presented opportunities for the suspension of normative behavioural codes, the upper atmosphere was a realm as yet ungoverned by British codes of conduct. While Jeffries interpreted the goal of his balloon adventures as the furtherance of atmospheric knowledge, Lunardi became the symbol of a potential new aerial society.