Balloonomania their ballooning stunts, with Blanchard and his companion Dr. John Jeffries being the first to cross the English channel in a balloon on January 7, 1785. The public reaction among intellectuals and academics was generally cooler, with some critics of balloonomania including the likes of Sir Joseph Banks and Samuel Johnson, who wrote in a 1783 letter to Hester Thrale, who had inquired about the nature of hot air balloons, “Happy are you, Madam, that have ease and leisure to want intelligence of air balloons. Their existence is, I believe, indubitable, but I know not that they can possibly be
Berlin scientific balloon flights the Académie française a program for scientific aviation, that was eventually not realized. In Germany, it was Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who first addressed the issue of research into the atmosphere in his writings on the use of balloons. The first balloon flight with the aim of making meteorological observations was undertaken on 30 November 1784 by the American medical doctor John Jeffries together with the professional balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard. Some of the first systematic investigations into the upper atmosphere was performed between 1862 and 1866 by the English meteorologist and important pioneer aerologist James Glaisher. On 28 balloon flights, he