During the early 1780s, the nascent science of ballooning captured public attention in Europe and America. In August 1783, John Quincy Adams attended the first public launching in Paris of a gas balloon ( Diary , 1:187), and his Diary in August and September contains numerous articles on ballooning copied from the Journal de Paris. John Adams, writing to Abigail Adams on 7 September 1783 xi(above), contemplated useful transportation by balloon: “The moment I hear of your arrival in Europe, I will fly with Post Horses to receive you at least, and if the Ballon, Should be carried to such Perfection in the mean time as to give Mankind the safe navigation of the Air, I will fly in one of them at the Rate of thirty Knots an hour.”

In November 1783, the popular young scientific lecturer Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes made the first free flight, rising from the Château de la Muette at Passy and traveling about six miles over Paris in about twenty-five minutes. And in September 1784, Abigail Adams 2d recorded the family and “eight or ten thousand” others viewing a balloon ascend from the Tuileries. Rising sometime after eleven in the morning, it traveled to “Bevre Bruay, fifty leagues from Paris,” by six in the evening (Abigail Adams 2d, Journal and Correspondence , 1:18–19; see also John Adams, Diary and Autobiography , 3:xiii, illustration facing p. 289).

The enthusiasm for ballooning diminished after its first fatal accident, in June 1785. Pilâtre de Rozier and Dr. Pierre Ange Romain crashed on the French shore while attempting to cross the English Channel. The gas balloon of their aéro-montgolfier, a two-balloon hot air and gas contraption, exploded, and they fell over a thousand feet to their deaths. Thomas Jefferson commented, “This will damp for a while the ardor of the Phaetons of our race who are endeavoring to learn us the way to heaven on wings of our own” (to Abigail Adams, 21 June 1785, below). Abigail Adams 2d described the accident in a letter to her cousin Lucy Cranch: “There has lately been a most terible accident taken place by a Balloons taking fire in the Air in which were two Men. Both of them were killed by their fall, and there limbs exceedingly Broken. Indeed the account is dreadfull. I confess I have no partiallity for them in any way” (23 June 1785 , below).

This illustration is from Jean Paul Marat's Lettres de l'observateur Bon-Sens, a m. de * * *, sur la fatale catastrophe des infortunes Pilâtre de Rosier & Romain, les aéronautes & l'aérostation, London, 1785. Marat, prior to attaining fame and martyrdom in the French Revolution, studied medicine and wrote on various branches of the sciences without much success. See also Hoefer, Nouv. biog. générale ; and Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel .