Balloons drift through two centuries of books, films and pictures, and along the way they picked up stories that never happened. This page sticks to the real ones: the novel everyone misremembers, the short film that won at Cannes, the 1862 flight that beats its own movie, and the photographer who took the first aerial picture and lost it.
The great mix-up: Verne's missing balloon
Ask anyone to picture Around the World in Eighty Days and a balloon floats up. Verne is partly to blame: he did write a famous balloon novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, which made his name in 1863. But when Phileas Fogg set out a decade later, in the 1873 novel, he traveled by train, steamer, elephant and wind-powered sledge. No balloon anywhere. The balloon came from Hollywood: Michael Todd's 1956 film version, with David Niven drifting over France in a striped gas balloon, won the Best Picture Oscar and welded the image to the story. Publishers have been putting balloons on the covers ever since. It made our list of things most people get wrong about balloons.
Balloons on screen
The balloon as stage exit goes back to L. Frank Baum. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the wizard is an Omaha balloonist blown off course, and he leaves the Emerald City the way he arrived, floating off without Dorothy. The 1939 film kept the scene, cruelty included.
Albert Lamorisse's Le Ballon Rouge (1956) follows a boy and a loyal red balloon through the streets of Menilmontant in Paris: thirty-four minutes, almost no dialogue, the short-film Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award for its screenplay. It is a gas balloon, strictly speaking, but no other film has caught why people look up.
Pixar's Up (2009) lifts a house on a few thousand helium balloons, which makes Carl Fredricksen a cluster balloonist rather than a hot air pilot. Cluster flights are real; none has ever carried a porch.
The Aeronauts, and the flight that beats it
The Aeronauts (2019) puts Eddie Redmayne's James Glaisher in a basket with a fictional pilot, Amelia Wren, and sends them higher than anyone had flown. The real story needs no invention. On 5 September 1862, Glaisher, a meteorologist, and Henry Coxwell, a professional aeronaut, rose from Wolverhampton to somewhere around 10 to 11 kilometers, above the height of Everest, with no oxygen and no pressure suits. Glaisher lost consciousness. Coxwell, his hands frozen useless, climbed into the rigging to free the tangled valve line and pulled it with his teeth to start the descent. Both men lived, and Glaisher was flying again within weeks. The film shuffled the characters; the history did not need the help. More flights like it are in records and adventures.
Nadar and the first aerial photograph
In 1858 the caricaturist turned photographer Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, known as Nadar, exposed the first aerial photograph in history from a tethered balloon over the outskirts of Paris. None of those first plates survive. The oldest aerial photograph still in existence is American: James Wallace Black's Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It, taken from about 1,200 feet on 13 October 1860. Nadar went on to become a celebrity aeronaut, built a giant balloon called Le Geant and crashed it near Hanover, and got himself immortalized twice: once in Honore Daumier's 1862 lithograph, and once by Jules Verne, who modeled Michel Ardan, the daredevil hero of From the Earth to the Moon, on him. Ardan is Nadar with the letters rearranged.
Balloonomania, 1783
Before any of this, balloons had already conquered the decorative arts. After the flights of 1783, France went balloon-mad: dresses printed with balloon motifs, hair piled up "a la montgolfiere", fans, snuffboxes and dinner services painted with the Montgolfier globe. The craze had a name, balloonomania, and it crossed the Channel within months. Collectors still trade the plates. It all started with the Montgolfier brothers, whose decorated paper-and-canvas balloon was itself a piece of rococo art, as the print at the top of this page shows.
The view beat the paintings
Two centuries of artists tried to catch it from the ground. The basket is still the best seat in the house.
Common questions
Is there a balloon in Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days?
No. Phileas Fogg never flies. The balloon was added by the 1956 film and has clung to the book's covers ever since. Verne's actual balloon novel is Five Weeks in a Balloon, from 1863.
What is the oldest surviving aerial photograph?
James Wallace Black's Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It, taken from a tethered balloon on 13 October 1860. Nadar flew with a camera earlier, in 1858, but those first plates are lost.
Could the house in Up really fly?
Not on party balloons; the lift math fails by a wide margin. Cluster ballooning itself is real: in 1982 Larry Walters rode a lawn chair under weather balloons to around 15,000 feet over Los Angeles, which is its own kind of cinema.