Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hi, welcome to our mini-cast.

So we thought, on the heels of the Nelly Black podcast, we would give you another example of daredevil tree.

Yes, we are going to discuss Sophie Blanchard.

She's not the first woman to ride in a balloon. She's 20 years too late for that, but she was the very first woman pilot.

That's very exciting. Now, we'll go back in time a little bit. We're going back about 100 years before our friend Nelly Bligh.

We are going back to 1778, which is the year that Marie Madalan, Sophie Amant, was born.

I know you always laugh when I speak, but it's not that good.

She lived in relative obscurity, really, until her marriage to the world's first professional balloonist, Jean-Pierre Blanchard.

Now, the date of her marriage is in dispute. Did she wish she married to him for 10 years before her first experience in a balloon or were they newly wedged?

We don't know. Even that is a little obscure.

But what is interesting and what is not obscure is that the type of person she was, which is what makes this story so fascinating, really.

She was very timid, very shy. She would get scared at horses.

And in an era when it was all horse-drawn transportation, your world must be there for very small.

She's little. She's very tiny, physically tiny. She's very meek. She's very nervous. You know this person.

And what does she do? She marries this man who may or may not, again, differing histories out there.

He may abandon his first wife and their four children.

So, you know, he married this rock star kind of out there guy, and he's just exactly the opposite.

So, Michelle Blanchard was a rock star, a French society.

What he was science-y, he was daring, but he was not, was business-y.

And he didn't handle it very well when those copycats came along.

Inevitably, you can be the first, and that's fabulous, but then you got to be flexible and smart when your rivals come along.

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