Photograph courtesy of the Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collection (Aviation)
You will never see an aesthete happily staring into the sky as the Great Forest Park Balloon Race floats by. All those horrid logos! It’s like a floating NASCAR race! Realtors, banks, breakfast cereals…and that bunny. When the Gordon Bennett international balloon race was launched in Forest Park 103 years ago, they did things with class and restraint: The balloons were black silk envelopes held in place with jute fishnet, the surface bearing nothing but a hand-painted numeral to mark the team. Mr. Bennett, the millionaire who bankrolled the race—it still exists—published The New York Herald. By 1907, he was exiled to Paris, expunged from the New York social register after showing up drunk to his fiancée’s parents’ mansion and peeing in the fireplace. (Or grand piano; accounts differ.) It was from there, in 1906, that he founded the “Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett.” St. Louis became the first American host city, perhaps because we had the right kind of French roots. The hot-air balloon is a peculiarly French invention: Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, brothers and Paris papermakers, set the first one aloft in 1783. The envelope was taffeta, with interior paper layers varnished with fireproof alum; the flight crew consisted of a sheep, Montauciel (“Climb-to-the-Sky”); a duck; and a rooster. What sounds like a lead-up to a folk tale was actually a carefully calibrated science experiment, with each creature present in order to test particular effects of air travel. Luxury wallpaper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon covered all 37,500 cubic feet of the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon with sky-blue paper painted with golden curlicues, astrological symbols, red fringy curtains, and the face of King Louis XVI, his head surrounded by a nimbus of sun rays. And so it was that the Aerostat Réveillon was named not for its inventors…but for its sponsor.
