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Hey, podcast listeners. I'm Anne Strange Champs, and on to the best of our knowledge this week, we're thinking about summer travel. And we've got an interview that would be really great to listen to if you

happen to be on a plane, or more likely waiting for one. Air travel is pretty mundane today,

but imagine being one of the very first people to see the earth from the sky, not in an airplane, but in a hot air balloon.

Steve Paulson brings us the story of the daring and crazy men and women who invented hot air

ballooning. Here's his conversation with cultural historian Richard Holmes about the book

Falling Downwards. It's part adventure story and part cautionary tale about the

dangers of flying high in the sky. My sense is that today, ballooning mostly is a curiosity.

But what I found amazing as I was reading your book is how much ballooning once captured the

public imagination, especially in the

19th century. Can you give us some sense of how widespread this fascination was?

Yeah, it is true. I mean, most people think flying began, let's say, with the Wright brothers,

Kitty Hawk, 1903, but actually people were flying in balloons for 120 years before then.

And it all began in the 1780s, 1783,

when a paper manufacturer, a paper bag manufacturer called Montgofier, two brothers,

discovered that if they filled a very large paper bag with hot air, it would take off.

And it would take off with amazing power.

I think the first one they launched went to something like 5,000 feet, and they suddenly

realized we've got something here. And within that year, 1783, they'd brought their invention

to Paris, and they launched the first man-carrying balloon, amazing balloon, 60-foot high,

that flew right across the river Sen, across Paris.

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