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:
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