On this day, October 7th, in 1870 Léon Gambetta escaped Paris using a hot air balloon.
The city was besieged, the situation dire. Paris had been shelled by the Germans and Napoleon’s empire had fallen; Gambetta helped to improvise a new government and Gambetta decided it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. and try to establish a new government somewhere else You couldn't do it by land, but he had access to some of the highest technology of the day: the hot air balloon.
Hot air balloons were premiered in France, and although the first balloon flight with humans aboard, a tethered flight, performed on or around October 15, 1783, by Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier, there was no guarantee that the enemy would allow a _man_ in a balloon to escape this way.
He made it out, trying to establish a new government from a base in Tours, even going so far as raising an army to come and liberate Paris. It was not to be, as Paris surrendered and the Franco-Prussiian War was over just a few months later in January.
Gambetta was a patriot and a credit to the French name. His life was full of adventure, intrigue, and striving to help his fellow man. But, as is the way with these things, we remember him now (if we remember him at all) as the first guy to escape a seige using a balloon.
From Space-X to a new inside-out Wenkel engine for DoD, it's been an amazing week for inventors.
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