September 15, 1861 – Air Mail Route from San Francisco Opens

California posed a new problem to the United States. While territories connected it with the East, California gained statehood almost spontaneously in 1850 thanks to the gold rush, becoming the first state separate from the Capital. Communication was difficult, to say the least. The new technology of telegraphs and railroads offered possibilities, but the lines would have to be constructed at immense cost. Wells, Fargo, & Company held a virtual monopoly on the task of express mail with a sea-and-land route across the Isthmus of Panama, cutting months off the journey around South America. An overland route would be even faster, and Congress sought a solution with a pledge of $600,000 in yearly subsidies. In 1858, the solution was found with the Overland Mail Company, a start-up with William Fargo on the board of directors. Over one million dollars would be spent improving its route across the West, which included way stations, horse corrals, and defenses against highwaymen and rogue Indians.

While mail could now be delivered, however expensively, by brave and hardy men, the passenger service was troubling. People were crammed into tiny carriages that bounced and rocked with every step the racing horses took. While some way stations offered places to sleep, coaches were hot-seated by their drivers and horses, and no one knew exactly when the next coach would come through, leaving passengers stuck in the middle of the West for days at a time. Food was expensive and notoriously bad. The option of crossing the Isthmus of Panama took much longer, but the comfort made it seem more practical.

Aeronauts John Wise and John La Mountain approached Fargo with a solution. As a pioneering American balloonist, he had made his first flight in 1835. Over the next years, he continued a serious study of aeronautics as well as making grand performances at county fairs. When the Civil War began, he was in competition with Thaddeus Lowe for the Army Balloon Corps to aid the Union with reconnaissance from the air. Lowe had beaten him to the Battle of Bull Run, but Wise had papers giving him the right of way. As Wise launched his balloon, it became entangled in brush and destroyed, ending his career for the Civil War. Lowe would go on to be Chief Aeronaut for the Union.

Wise planned to return to a normal life for some time, using balloons as perhaps a map-making tool, but the showman La Mountain met with him, inspired about the West. Years earlier, the two had worked on a transatlantic project, but the balloon had crashed and nearly ended their partnership. On his own in 1859, Wise had made the first air mail delivery in the United States, delivering 123 letters from Lafayette to Crawford, Indiana. Why could they not do the same for overland delivery over the Rockies?

They posed the question to Fargo. A smooth, peaceful sail over the mountains with no threat of robbery or attack sounded like a much more reasonable trip to Fargo, though the idea of balloon passenger service was uncanny. La Mountain suggested it could be at the very least a public relations demonstration, which caused Fargo to agree. The two set off on a ship through Panama, arriving in San Francisco and immediately launching their balloon on the third anniversary of the Overland Mail to the shock of newspapers around California. Newspapers in the East did not know the story until the balloon arrived in Kansas City, Missouri, on September 20. They had touched down twice at way stations to replenish fuel and food for their passenger, newspaperman and adventurer Bret Harte. The press latched onto the story from Harte's accounts, and Fargo was impressed enough to send Wise and La Mountain back with supplies for a larger balloon.

By spring of 1862, Wise and La Mountain had created a two-story balloon with privies and a lounge for their passengers. The balloon, dubbed the California, carried as many as fifteen passengers in comfort as well as whatever mail could be used as ballast. For years, the eastbound California would fly, landing in Kansas or sometimes Missouri, depending upon the wind. Wise and La Mountain improved their steering capabilities, but the possibility of floating west was made impossible by the “high winds” (what we now know as the jet stream).

On May 10, 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed. Fargo pulled funding from the expensive, though pleasurable, balloon project despite Wise and La Mountain's pleadings. Progress had changed the world, Fargo explained, even the Overland Mail Company was being shut down. Armed with their savings, they built the Odyssey and began their transatlantic attempt in 1873 from New York. Neither was heard from again. The Atlantic would not be crossed until British aeronauts made a west-heading route to Barbados in 1958-9.


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In reality, the crash crossing Lake Ontario did indeed end Wise and La Mountain's partnership. Wise and La Mountain performed additional ascensions, with La Mountain working under Lowe during the Civil War in the Balloon Corps. Wise would make his final ascent in 1879 at age 71, disappearing over Lake Michigan.

August 8, 1709 – Gusmão's Balloon Falls

In his third attempt to prove the ability of flight for a lighter-than-air craft, a young Brazilian Jesuit displayed his invention before King John V of Portugal, his queen Maria, a papal messenger, and a host of nobles from the court at Lisbon. He had come up with the idea months before watching a bubble of soap float in the air and successfully petitioned the king for an audience. His first attempt had been a failure as the paper balloon had burst into flame before rising, and his second attempt allowed the balloon to rise, but it, too, caught fire and was beaten down by servants before it reached the ceiling.

The young priest, named Bartolomeu de Gusmão, was a Brazilian born 1685 in Sao Paulo and moved to Bahia to pursue the priesthood, though he soon left it in pursuit of knowledge. He had showed vast intelligence as an inquisitive youngster. When only twenty years old, Gusmão petitioned the Bahia to recognize an invention to raise water one hundred feet out of a running stream, thus saving countless man-hours in hauling buckets. With an already impressive résumé, he left for Portugal in 1708 to follow further intellectual pursuits.

Armed with this new idea of a flying ship, he approached the king, who was very curious to see the device. In this last attempt, Gusmão's balloon began to rise, did not catch fire, but then collapsed suddenly. The nobility made mumbles of disappointment, and Gusmão was dismissed, disheartened, but not defeated. His sharp mind ran over the questions of the balloon's failure continuously, to the point some said it consumed him.

Finally he decided that the problem was simply a structural fluke, paper perhaps wet from moisture or weakened from smoke, and he began to build more and more complex models. Gusmão did not dare trust the devices to work alone outside of his grasp, so he decided that he would have to be inside the craft at all times. Using whatever money he could scrape together from curious patrons and exhibiting tricks of floating paper balloons, he earned enough to build his “Passarola”, a bird-shaped craft made of lightweight wicker and a copper tinderbox that would fill a sheet of skins above him with hot air for lift. In 1720, still very suspicious of his device even to the point of meticulously training the rope-handlers to keep the Passarola in line with the open square in which he would give his demonstration, he would light the tender and become the first person to successfully fly in a hot air balloon.

Lisbon became entranced. The Inquisition was suspicious of Gusmão's human hubris, but the king protected him, encouraging construction of more devices. Over the rest of his life, Gusmão would build seven Passarolas, the largest capable of carrying five passengers, and ballooning would spread throughout Europe. In the Seven Years' War, for example, balloon-held platforms and baskets were used to survey battlefields much to the pleasure of their commanders. After Gusmão's death in 1756, ballooning would plateau for a time until the 1780s experiments of the Montgolfier brothers in Paris. Familiar with the concept of ballooning and puzzling over the assault of the fortress at Gibraltar (accepted to be impenetrable from land and sea), Joseph Montgolfier proposed balloons that did not need ground ropes but could navigate the wind effectively. For this, they needed propulsion.

After many attempts with feathered oars and mockups of wings, the Montgolfier brothers determined a method of spinning blades, carefully weighted and balanced, to form wide propellers. Meanwhile, other balloonists would develop hydrogen for lift rather than the hot air that required so much extra weight for fireboxes. In 1785, the English Channel would be crossed by balloonists Jean-Pierre Blanchard and the American John Jeffries. Combining the more technologically advanced lift, the propeller, and the safety of the parachute (invented by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, in 1783), balloons became popular transport for the wealthy rather than the bumpiness of carriages.

In the Napoleonic Wars, balloons became effective as troop transports. Always adept of new technology, Napoleon would use balloons in attacks against fortresses, first to lay down bombs where artillery could not reach and then as ships to drop in parachute-bearing crack troops. The air-borne invasion of England across the Channel in 1812 would send panic throughout Britain, but the logistics of the troops would prove ineffective as reinforcements could rarely duplicate the crossing under English fire.

Through the course of the next century, the airship would become an effective mode of transport for freight and passengers. While never totally effective in battle (the balloons were too easy to pop, even with more rigid designs), most cities had aerodromes by the 1870s. The American Wright Brothers would produce another aircraft design, one heavier than air, in 1903, which would change the course of air travel forever. While small, fast, heavier-than-air craft are common, the combined form of a winged, rigid balloon invented by the German Zeppelin would come to dominate the sky for more leisurely passengers and, especially, long-distance freight. It is said today that one can never look at a sunset without seeing at least two of these craft as shadows against the crimson air.


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In reality, Gusmão's balloon did work. He was awarded a professorship and canonized by the king, as well as being a court chaplain two years later. These responsibilities distracted him from his designs, though he did put together a workable passenger craft for display in 1720. During the experiment, the rope-handlers became negligent, and the ship crashed against a building. Publicly embarrassed and mocked, as well as supposedly hounded by the Inquisition, Gusmão would leave Portugal for Spain, where he would die of fever in 1724. Europe would not see manned balloons for another sixty years.