ONE DAY AT THE end of December 1784, several thousand people crowded into an inn yard in a town in the middle of England. It was cold; sky and rooftops merged in winter gloom. The shivering mass stood patiently. Many had travelled for miles, coming in by coach, by horse, on foot from distant towns and outlying villages. Some had spent the night half-frozen in stables, doorways, any kind of rough shelters. Assembled with an excitement barely dulled by cold, they waited. They waited for an hour, two hours, three hours, four … even rumours moved slowly. Nonetheless, the crowd did not thin; at its edges more latecomers arrived, all hopeful for a sight of the balloon. There was a promise it would ascend that day, with an aeronaut who would rise to the skies, a sight unlike anything most of the crowd had ever seen before. Many of them did not know quite what to expect. The demonstration was, the crowd understood, a beginning – and there was much that could go wrong. It was heroic to make the attempt. If it succeeded, the world of the air was a step closer to being open to human endeavour. The sea had once been uncharted; now the skies were on the brink of discoveries. Who knew where those would lead? What would it mean if people could travel like birds, as easy as eagles in the upper atmosphere? Here in Birmingham they were about to see a flight of imagination and new reality.

This crowd was enormous. Beyond the inn yard they swelled out into the streets, where all the shops were shut up in expectation of an event bigger than commerce. Some of those attending had followed the progress of this new invention through newspapers, pamphlets and the first of the new books discussing it.