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The author puts the first forty years of ballooning into the context of the Enlightenment, society, politics, economics and culture. In six chapters he gives a thorough inventory of all the flights of any importance and a number of unimportant ones. The first deals with ideas of flight, going back to the Greeks and featuring Cyrano de Bergerac, prior to the invention of balloons. The importance of the actual invention of the first balloons by Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier is downplayed in favour of their choice of a public demonstration at home in Annonay. Thereafter we have a brief mention of the development of a hydrogen balloon by Charles and no account of the first flights in Paris. Instead, Lynn emphasizes the rapid spread of balloon flights across France and Europe. He gives a census of flights in Lyon, Dijon, Marseille and 'countless other cities in France' (p. 15) with one or two sentences devoted to each, and touches on launches in Piedmont, Spain, Italy, Britain, the Austrian Netherlands (he says Spanish), Holland and Russia. There follows a section on deaths and disasters, and on how the invention of parachuting recaptured the flagging imagination of the public.
The chapter...