This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

Listener Josiah, who has sent us just a ton of very good episode suggestions,

sent in a request for an episode on the 1819 balloon riot.

We do have a number of episodes on balloons and ballooning,

including the Mongolia brothers and Sophie Blanchard

and Essay Andres' attempt to get to the North Pole by balloon.

And we have mentioned in those episodes

that balloons became a huge fad starting in the late 18th century

and into the 19th century.

I don't think we have ever talked about how much rioting was associated with that. We have talked more about excitement and not about

tearing stuff apart. This 1819 incident that Josiah requested was not the only riot to talk about,

in other words. We are going to cover several in this episode, but it is not all of the balloon

riots. Over the course of my research, I found various like mentions of other riots as kind of

asides or mentioned in footnotes or in newspaper

article would say blah, blah, blah, blah, similarly to the thing that happened to this other time.

But then I was not able to find a lot of detail about that other time, briefly mentioned.

It's also possible that there were other more documented balloon riot

incidents that I just didn't happen to stumble over while working on this. These riots all involved

...