Francois Pilatrê de Rozier and Francois Laurent, Marquis of Arlanders talk.
Francois P.: You’re tellin’ me that there’s a balloon museum? That what we started way back in 1783 with that first manned flight is now memorialized in a museum? Where is this museum? I’d like to see it, but, please, don’t tell me it’s in China.
Francois L.: Indianola, Iowa, I think. Not too far from where Americans began seeing a large balloon sent from China, a “gift” from their army, I suppose.
Francois P.: Really?
Francois L.: No, I think they call it a “spy balloon.”
Francois P.: I did learn that long after we made that first flight balloons served a military purpose, and spying was that initial purpose. Get up high, see the enemy’s positions.
Francois L.: Oui. Later, balloons were even used as defensive barriers when people used heavier-than-air ships, planes, I think they called them.
Francois P.: But when you said there is a balloon museum, I thought you meant party balloons, multicolored, filled with helium, the gas that was unavailable to us when we used fire to make a hot air balloon we had built from paper and silk.
Francois L.: Nature of humanity, I guess. Whatever we invent seems inevitably to have a military use. Knives to bayonets. Fireworks to rockets with warheads. Lanterns to flashlights to lasers. Helicopters to toy drones to drone bombs or drones with rockets. Elements to atomic bombs. And hot air balloons carrying two French guys to giant spy balloons gathering data over sensitive military sites. Nature of humanity. What’s next? Cures into pandemics?
Francois P.: Been there; done that. It’s called biological warfare.
Francois L.: I suppose that the next invention will end up as a military weapon, but who way back in the eighteenth century would have thought that something as simple and as joyous as a balloon, would have become a weapon?
Francois P.: Not I. I thought we had made a theme park ride that would make us a few francs and get us invited to one of Louis XVI’s parties at Versailles.
Francois P.: You’re tellin’ me that there’s a balloon museum? That what we started way back in 1783 with that first manned flight is now memorialized in a museum? Where is this museum? I’d like to see it, but, please, don’t tell me it’s in China.
Francois L.: Indianola, Iowa, I think. Not too far from where Americans began seeing a large balloon sent from China, a “gift” from their army, I suppose.
Francois P.: Really?
Francois L.: No, I think they call it a “spy balloon.”
Francois P.: I did learn that long after we made that first flight balloons served a military purpose, and spying was that initial purpose. Get up high, see the enemy’s positions.
Francois L.: Oui. Later, balloons were even used as defensive barriers when people used heavier-than-air ships, planes, I think they called them.
Francois P.: But when you said there is a balloon museum, I thought you meant party balloons, multicolored, filled with helium, the gas that was unavailable to us when we used fire to make a hot air balloon we had built from paper and silk.
Francois L.: Nature of humanity, I guess. Whatever we invent seems inevitably to have a military use. Knives to bayonets. Fireworks to rockets with warheads. Lanterns to flashlights to lasers. Helicopters to toy drones to drone bombs or drones with rockets. Elements to atomic bombs. And hot air balloons carrying two French guys to giant spy balloons gathering data over sensitive military sites. Nature of humanity. What’s next? Cures into pandemics?
Francois P.: Been there; done that. It’s called biological warfare.
Francois L.: I suppose that the next invention will end up as a military weapon, but who way back in the eighteenth century would have thought that something as simple and as joyous as a balloon, would have become a weapon?
Francois P.: Not I. I thought we had made a theme park ride that would make us a few francs and get us invited to one of Louis XVI’s parties at Versailles.
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