JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Aviation and Flight series
Flying wasn’t always depicted as a mythic or glamorous or future-inspirational, as we can see in this 1785/6 etching by social memoralist and caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson:
[Image source: the British Museum.]
“Lunardi, slim and handsome, walks diagonally towards the spectator from the right, supported on a staff, his left hand held out as if begging…”(–LOC) is one description of this print, though Lunardi himself seems to have been an upper-crust Frenchman of Italian lineage who made a number of successful ascents in 1784/5, or at least enough success to write a book about them. He did suffer a few tragedies, one of which did put him into a rescuable position in the sea. Currently, though, I’m not sure why this image came into being–perhaps he asked one too many times the wrong person for help with funding his project. Nevertheless it is interesting to see such a grounding image of the enterprise of flight just a few years after the first Mongolfier flight.
The legend beneath the image is reproduced more legibly in Joseph Greco, Rowlandson the Caricaturist, 1880 (below, and here), revealing a Rufus Thomas-like versifying (Thomas would rhyme “Sidewalk” and “BAltimore” and make it work) by same-self-singing “town” and “balloon”:
And Lunardi depicted in happier circumstances (“Captain Vincenzo Lunardi with his Assistant George Biggin, and Mrs. Letitia Anne Sage, in a Balloon, by John Francis Rigaud”, via Wikipedia), which seems to be more the case in his making it into print than the panhandler image above:
