fiefoe

Romance with balloons:

Dr Johnson: All truth is valuable and all knowledge pleasing in its first effects, and may subsequently be useful.
Bank's most reliable informant (on hot air balloons) was the wily old American Ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin.
The Montgolfiers described (their pear-shaped balloon design) memorably as 'putting a cloud in a paper bag'.
Franklin: 'Someone asked me - what's the use of a balloon? I replied - what's the use of a newborn baby?'
The members of Brooks's Club were said to be laying bets on who should first have 'an amorous encounter' in a balloon.
He pointed out to Blanchard that there was still one last way of throwing out personal ballast (by evacuation.)
(Ballooning craze) was like a collective gasp of hope and longing.
Laplace on God in reply to Napoleon: 'Citizen First Consul, I have no need of that hypothesis."

From the footnotes:

Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, constructed on Brittany materials, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, based on local Lyme Regis legend, also belong to this tradition.
Jenner's quiet meticulous description of the baby cuckoo (while still blind) relentlessly wheelbarrowing its smaller 'rival' sparrow chick backwards, between its half-formed wings, up the side of the nest until it was thrown out..
The ribbon fell out of Beddoes's letter as I unfolded it in the Truro archive, and I let out a republican whoop! that almost led to my ejection.

"Age of Wonder" (Reply)