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
Jean-Pierre Blanchard Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia in Prague in September 1791. Following the invention of the modern parachute in 1783 by Sébastien Lenormand in France, in 1785 Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated it as a means of jumping safely from a hot air balloon. While Blanchard's first parachute demonstrations were conducted with a dog as the passenger, he later had the opportunity to try it himself when in 1793 his hot air balloon ruptured and he used a parachute to escape. Subsequent development of the parachute focussed on making it more compact. While the early parachutes were made of linen stretched