Ordinarily, it would be a bye-week for the podcast, but it’s Women’s History Month! So I’m bringing you an episode from the archive of supporters-only bonus episodes. If you sign up as a supporter during March 2026, you’ll be automatically entered into a prize drawing for some free Her Half of History merch.
Humanity dreamed of flight for a very long time. One of the earliest myths of it is the classical one, where Daedalus fashions wings for himself and his son Icarus. And the wings work! Until Icarus flies too close to the sun, melting the wax that holds his wings together. Real life historical people were said to fly too. Such as Alexander the Great who supposedly harnessed griffins so that he had a flying carriage (Medievalists.net).
At around the same time that Ovid recorded the most familiar version of Daedalus and Icarus’s story, the Chinese were hoping for the same. The emperor Wang Mang was fighting the Xiongnu, and he needed help. There were many who said they had extraordinary powers, including some who said they could fly a thousand miles in a day and spy out the enemy encampment. Wang Mang tried them out. They covered themselves with genuine bird feathers and took off, but they could only fly a few hundred steps before they would fall. And I quote, “Mang knew they were useless, but just wanted to gain their reputation, so he appointed them as military managers, gave them carriages and horses, and waited for them to go.” (Book of Han, volume 99, part 2).
I actually think flying a few hundred steps is pretty good! But you can see that the early tales of flight were mostly about failure, and nothing was going to change there. Across the ages there was one attempt after another to construct wings: the Arabs, the English, the Italians, and the Persians all recorded audacious inventors. In the words of one of my sources: “Medieval people could fly. However, landings were another matter” (Medievalists.net)
One thing that all the stories I ran across had in common was that the passengers were men. Eventually in Europe women were thought to fly, but only on broomsticks. Witchcraft was an ancient crime, but the broomsticks concept was first depicted in 1451. Since I’m leaving the flatly magical version of flight out of this episode, that will have to be saved. Maybe for a future Halloween episode.
Returning to the semi-scientific version of flight, it was only the very next year, 1452, that a certain Leonardo da Vinci was born. He drew several designs of a flying machine, but like countless hopefuls before him, the designs were flawed. Which did not stop a number of other less famous inventors drawing still other flawed designs after him.
Where the majority of Western inventors had gone wrong was in thinking that human flight was going to resemble bird flight. It took a long time to ditch that idea. The Asians were more interested in kites, but that wasn’t really the winning idea either.
The Hot Air Balloon
The real history of flights that actually worked begins in France in the late 18th century. The Montgolfier brothers were experimenting not with wings, but with hot air because hot air rises. The first passengers went up in a tethered balloon from Versailles on September 19, 1783. Those passengers were: a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. All of which survived, I am happy to report, though that was somewhat of a surprise to the onlookers. Those onlookers included King Louis XVI, and the royal family, which I presume included the queen Marie Antoinette (Smithsonian Institution, Chateau de Versailles).
On November 21, 1783, the first untethered balloon with a human being in it went up, and two weeks later launches began over Paris, much to the excitement of the populace. Balloons were all the rage and vendors were not slow to take advantage. You could buy balloon-themed jewelry, snuffboxes, wallpaper, chandeliers, bird cages, fans, clocks, furniture, hats, drinks, and toys. One of the eager spectators was none other than Benjamin Franklin, who wrote a letter to a friend saying that “all conversation here at present turns upon the balloons.” A 16-year-old John Quincy Adams reported that so many accidents had happened to people experimenting with hydrogen (highly flammable) that the government had prohibited it (Smithsonian Institution).
There was a feeling in the air that human beings, formerly stuck in the muddy ground of earth, were becoming gods, free to soar above petty things like gravity and the ground.
But still, as far as we know, no woman had ever been a passenger. Not in an untethered balloon.
Until the following summer. In the city of Lyon, France, a balloon flight was planned on June 4, 1784. The balloon had been built by a Monsieur Fleurant, first name unknown. The spectator of honor was the King of Sweden who was visiting, and in whose honor the balloon was named La Gustave. Monsieur Fleurant planned to fly with his friend, a local count. However, the count backed out at the last minute. Probably because he was scared (and there was plenty of reason to be scared). The crowd was amazed when his replacement stepped up (Laplace).
Her name was Elisabeth Thible, and we really don’t know a lot about her. We do know her maiden name was Estrieux, and there is a birth certificate for an Elisabeth Estrieux in 1757, which would put her in her late twenties at the time of this balloon flight. There is also a marriage contract on the record when she married Claude Thible. She was 14 (Laplace).
She is generally mentioned in the history of flight as an opera singer. But not, as far as I can tell, because we have any record of her singing professionally. You’ll see why she is thought to be a singer in a minute.
After her flight, she wrote a letter to a friend describing it and the friend submitted it to an encyclopedia, which published it as an event of note in 1784. The friend wanted it published because he was eager to “teach those air travelers from Paris that even in the provinces, a traveler was able to write an interesting account about flight. I assure you, the letter is from her” (Journal, 289).
Just a little bit of provincial persecution complex going on there, and Elisabeth has a hint of that too. She says in her letter:
“My dear [friend], you know how much I wanted to fly in a balloon. You know that if my health had been good for the past four years, I might have given an example to the men who pioneered the path to the heavens for me. Finally, my departure was decided for the day when the King of Sweden, Gustave III could witness the ascent; but the day before this much-anticipated event, didn’t someone come to tell me that success was doubtful? Judge how alarming that was!
From that moment on, I had no more sleep, no more food. However on the morning of the day itself, I was assured that the machine would work… Time did not pass quickly enough for my liking… Gustave worried too much; he came under the canvas, wanting to know the travelers and deigned to fear for me a danger which did not frighten me. The balloon rose a little and everyone was worried, but I reassured them… We rekindled our fire and left the earth and its inhabitants.
“What a pleasure, my dear [friend], when we leave this earth where desire and interest run wild! What a delight to rise to the celestial regions where reigns, it is true, the most majestic silence and the most perfect peace! In this imposed calm, it was easy to forget this poor world from which we soared… I abandoned myself … and I sang like Arsène!” (Journal, 289-294)
Here I must interrupt Elisabeth to explain Arsène, which clearly she expected her reader to know. But I’m betting you don’t. I didn’t either.
La Belle Arsène was a comic opera by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, written about ten years before Elisabeth took the air. Even if you are a dedicated opera fan, I’m betting you don’t know La Belle Arsène because it’s in the dustbin of history. The most famous operas of the time period were all Mozart’s. Posterity did not choose to keep Monsigny around. I can say this with certainty because it was my firm intention to track down a recording and give you a clip here, but I can find no recording of it whatsoever. The libretto still exists, the score still exists, both are readily available on the Internet, but as far as I can tell, not one modern opera company has found it worthy of a modern production with modern recording equipment. Not even some music history PhD candidate on the loose has rounded up a few friends to do it and post it on YouTube. There’s one professional recording of one duet from it. But not the aria Elisabeth chose. Nada. Zilch available online.
In desperation, I went back to that score to see if I could record it myself. I do sing professionally, but opera is not my genre. And having taken a look, I can assure you that Elisabeth Thible must have had some serious vocal technique if she gave this a try. It’s no easy-to-join-in folk song. The words are “Is there a more glorious fate? I will walk on thunder, and I will reign in heaven. I rise beyond the air, and I hover over the universe!” Only those words are in French of course (Favart). The text is very appropriate to Elisabeth’s situation. You can see why they came to her mind.
Now with some trepidation, I will give you a little piece:
Have no fear, I shall torture you with no more. It just gets harder (and higher) from there. But if any of you want to go get that PhD in music history and reviving this opera is your contribution to world knowledge, let me know. And put it online, please!
The Crash Landing
Anyway back to Elisabeth who, like any great writer, needs a little drama to heighten the interest because raptures get boring. She goes on:
“These delicious reveries were brusquely interrupted by the snapping of one of the planks beneath my feet.”
[One wonders if that happened mid-phrase of the aria! Maybe on a high note?]
“For the sake of avoiding a hasty exit into the country of chimeras, I had to put one foot on the outer edge of the gondola… I held on with my elbows, so that my hands could alternately feed the fire…
“Eventually, we were at the highest elevation that I think possible. We had pains in our ears, the beginning of deafness, difficulty breathing, and with these threats, we were forced to reduce the fire and begin descending… We had flown for 45 minutes, and we looked for a landing point… Before we reached it, our balloon caught fire, and we fell with a speed that frightened the spectators, but not us because we didn’t have time to notice [the fire]” (Journal, 289-294).
As it turned out, Elisabeth and Monsieur Fleurant crash landed onto a hill and were enveloped in smoke. But both of them got out. Elisabeth had a sprained ankle. That was all. But it didn’t matter because she wasn’t allowed to walk anyway. The crowd raised her up on an armchair and carried her in a triumphal procession, while everyone cheered and expressed their admiration, right up until the point that she said she really was in pain and could she please have a carriage instead? (Journal, 289-294)
In a past episode, I mentioned that the first woman to fly in a balloon did so dressed as the goddess Minerva, and I have only just now gotten around to mentioning that here. I said it because all the secondary accounts I read online said so. However, I was disappointed when I translated Elisabeth’s letter that it does not even mention her clothing. If you were going around dressed as a goddess, wouldn’t you think it worth mentioning? I would. Anyway, I do not know the origin of the outfit detail, but as I cannot source it, I have to admit that I do not know what Elisabeth wore on her big day. I hope it was a goddess outfit.
Having achieved her lifelong dream, Elisabeth Thible fades back out of history. I’ve seen that the Paris Academy gave her and Fleurant a medal, but my source on that (Laplace) didn’t cite their source on that part, and there she is, gone back out of history. That’s all there is.
But women were far from done with taking flight. At the time of Elisabeth’s flight, on the other side of France, a six-year-old girl probably hadn’t seen or dreamed of a balloon yet. But she would. And she’d be the first woman in the world to pilot one. Her name was Sophie Blanchard.
If you enjoyed this bonus episode, I have lots of others on Patreon, which you can purchase individually for $5, but it’s a better deal to sign up as a subscriber and get them all. Whatever you can do to support, you are much appreciated.If you sign up as a supporter during March 2026, you’ll be automatically entered into a prize drawing for some free Her Half of History merch.
Selected Sources
Chateau de Versailles. “The First Hot Air Balloon Flight.” Palace of Versailles, 27 Oct. 2016, en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/key-dates/first-hot-air-balloon-flight.
