The balloonist C. F. Durant, having earlier been successful in nine ascents elsewhere, made three aerial sorties in Boston during the summer of 1834. Although no claim was advanced that Durant provided Boston with its first opportunity to observe the ascent of a balloon with a human passenger, the three ascensions in 1834, on 31 July, 25 August, and 15 September, particularly the first, occasioned widespread public interest. John Quincy Adams, reflecting still the interest in aerostatics he had shown in Paris in 1784, witnessed the event from the roof of Dr. George Parkman’s house and commented later that “It made my heart ache when I saw him xxsuspended between Earth and Heaven, to think how needlessly men will be prodigal of Life, and how wantonly they will defy the Laws of Nature.” See Diary and Autobiography of John Adams , Cambridge, 1961, 3:xiii, 170; below, p. 353. Charles Francis Adams observed the ascension, also, noting that “it was a beautiful spectacle and the whole town and it’s vicinity were alive to witness it” (below, p. 352).

It was Durant’s hope, of course, that as many as possible of the interested public would, at a cost of fifty cents, witness, to the accompaniment of cannon and the music of a band, the ascension together with the various processes antecedent to it, from the large amphitheatre designed to accommodate six to seven thousand persons, which had been constructed for the occasion on Charles Street at “the bottom of the Common” (Boston Daily Advertiser, 31 July, p. 2, cols. 2 and 6; below, p. 352). The circumstances, perhaps, justified Charles Francis Adams’ observation: “Such is the daring of man in pursuit of mere pelf, for the idea of philosophical advancement is pretty nearly given up.” Indeed, half a century or more had elapsed since Cavendish’s experiments made possible the pioneering ascents of the brothers Montgolfier and others, since the first attempts to gather scientific data of the free air and the first successful voyage by air over the English Channel by Jean Pierre Blanchard and Dr. John Jeffries of Boston (loyalist, physician to John Adams and his family in London); over forty years since the feasibility of ascension and safe descent had been demonstrated in the United States by Blanchard at Philadelphia. See “Aerial Navigation” in American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, 1:247–256 (February 1835); John Langdon Sibley and Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, Cambridge and Boston, 1873– , 15:419–427; and Dictionary of American Biography under Jeffries; below, p. 352.

Following Durant’s first Boston aerial voyage, which ended in the sea off Cape Ann after an hour and ten minutes, his second and third ended respectively at Mount Auburn in Cambridge and at Lincoln, fifteen miles from Boston, after an hour and forty-five minutes in the air. See Boston Daily Advertiser, 2 August, p. 2, col. 6; 26 August, p. 2, col. 2; 15 September, p. 2, col. 3; below, p. 353.

The wood engraving reproduced is said by the editors of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge to have been made from a drawing “we had taken on the spot, just as the balloon was departing from the amphitheatre, amidst the peals of cannon and the shouts of the multitude” (1:254). Accompanying it (1:255) was the engraving, also reproduced, of the apparatus by which the several thousand cubic feet of hydrogen gas needed to inflate the balloon was produced in barrels in which the decomposition of water was effected with iron and sulphuric acid, and through a complex of tubes extruding from the barrels introduced into a central tank and then into the bag itself. See Boston Daily Advertiser, 31 July, p. 2, col. 6.