On This Day in 1785, Two Men Braved Death When They Flew Across the English Channel in a Balloon

On this day in 1785, a hydrogen-filled balloon was floating across the English Channel when it began to sink. In desperation, the two passengers began throwing possessions overboard, including their food, a pair of silk-wrapped oars they’d planned to use to “row” through the air—and finally, the clothes on their backs. Remarkably, the balloon lifted, then landed safely in France, marking the first aerial crossing of the English Channel.

The men in the basket were French exhibition balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries, an American doctor.

The flying balloon had only been invented a couple years before, by French brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier. On June 4, 1783, the Montgolfiers had launched a silk balloon lined with paper. Carrying a dangling basket equipped with a fire that inflated the balloon with hot air, the craft rose up to 6,600 feet above Annonay, France. In ten minutes of flight, it traveled over a mile. A few months later, the brothers launched the same balloon, this time carrying passengers: a sheep, a duck and a rooster. On November 21, two men drifted over five miles in 25 minutes in the balloon: mankind’s first flight.

As Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, wrote of ballooning’s first year, “Among all our circle of friends, at all our meals, in the antechambers of our lovely women, as in the academic schools, all one hears is talk of experiments, atmospheric air, inflammable gas, flying cars, journeys in the sky.”

Blanchard was inspired by the Montgolfiers’ contraption. He had been designing his own flying machines since the 1770s, theorizing that one might sail upon winds in a boat-like craft equipped with a rudder and oars. Once described as “an unpleasant creature—a petulant little fellow,” Blanchard was also “courageous to the bone,” according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. He flew his first hydrogen gas balloon in Paris in March 1784. Later that year, he arrived in England, preparing for a risky journey across the 20-mile Strait of Dover between England and France.

Jeffries, a Boston physician, had emigrated to Britain during the American Revolution. Interested in the science behind balloon flying, he offered to fund young Blanchard’s work, provided he could ascend with him to conduct atmospheric research. In November 1784, the two men flew a balloon above London; a few months later, they were set to cross the English Channel.

The balloon dropped in altitude twice during their journey. It was the second descent that caused the pilots to panic. Jeffries later described the journey to John Quincy Adams, who journaled, “He related his voyage, in which his intrepidity had well nigh been fatal to him. … He and Mr. Blanchard were both of them obliged to throw almost all their clothes in the water. At one time they were not more than 20 yards above the surface.”

Indeed, the pilots threw nearly everything from the balloon, including Blanchard’s trousers, into the ocean below before rising to safety. After reaching the mainland, the men discharged five or six pounds of “secretions of their kidneys” over the forest below, allowing the balloon to stay aloft until Calais.

After urinating for their lives, the pair reached the French port city, then traveled on to Paris, where they were met with celebration. Blanchard went on to perform the first crewed balloon flight in North America, flying from Philadelphia to New Jersey in 1793.

Aerial travel had long been birds-only. As two of ballooning’s pioneers, Blanchard and Jeffries set out on flights that were part of an exciting era of innovation and public curiosity in Europe and the United States—the beginning of aviation.

As one observer wrote of a balloon launch in France, “It is impossible to describe that moment … the women in tears; the common people raising their hands to the sky in deep silence; the passengers leaning out of the gallery, waving and crying out in joy … the feeling of fright gives way to wonder.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.