Richard Holmes - Falling Upwards

Falling Upwards.  What a wonderful title for a history of ballooning.

As someone with more than a slight interest in the history of science and technology*, I intend to buy a copy of this new book.

Falling Upwards is a wonderful history of the early years of ballooning, crammed with adventures and musings. Beginning in the 1780s with the generation that thought travel would be revolutionised by the balloon, it finishes at the end of the 19th century, when ballooning appealed only to those wanting something “refreshingly unreliable: a means to mysterious adventure rather than a mode of mundane travel”.
A brief history of ballooning - Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph.

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* please see: The Chatter Box
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