“A Cloud in a paper bag” is how one of the inventors of the hot-air balloon described it in the 1780s. Compared with other descriptions of and predictions for it (the French writer Victor Hugo stated ...
FALLING UPWARDS: How We Took to the Air, by Richard Holmes. Pantheon, 404 pp., $35. "Show me a balloon and I'll show you a story; quite often a tall one," Richard Holmes tells us in "Falling Upwards." ...
“Falling Upwards” takes readers on a quirky journey of discovery. The clock is turned back to an age when the balloon miraculously opens up the heavens to mankind. An English inventor “suggested that ...