Louis Blériot of 1909. Like some of the other prizes offered by the paper, it was widely seen as nothing more than a way to gain cheap publicity: the Paris newspaper "Le Matin" commenting that there was no chance of the prize being won. The English Channel had been crossed by an unmanned hydrogen balloon in 1784 and a manned crossing by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries followed in 1785. Blériot, who intended to fly across the Channel in his Type XI monoplane, had three rivals for the prize, the most serious being Hubert Latham, a French national of English extraction flying
Hot air ballooning Lewis. The song "Get It Up" from the 1983 New England release Walking Wild is about hot air ballooning. The song "Let Everything Go" by Phil Keaggy (1981) is about hot air ballooning. In "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), the wizard leaves the Emerald City in a gas balloon, not a hot air balloon. In "Around the World in Eighty Days" a gas balloon, not a hot air balloon, (featured on the movie poster) is used to cross the Pyrenees. In "Enduring Love" (2004), a hot air balloon is involved in a tragic accident during the opening scene. In "The