First Balloon Crosses English Channel: Dover to Calais

Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries climbed into a wicker basket beneath a hydrogen balloon on the cliffs of Dover on January 7, 1785, and pointed themselves toward France. They carried a compass, a barometer, a packet of letters from London to Paris, and thirty pounds of ballast. Within minutes over the English Channel, they realized they did not have enough lift. The balloon began descending as it crossed the midpoint of the Channel. Blanchard, a French aeronaut who had already made several balloon flights in Paris, started throwing everything overboard. First the ballast. Then the anchors. Then their provisions. Then the oars they had optimistically brought for "steering." The balloon continued to sink. They stripped off their outer clothing, jackets, trousers, and boots, and tossed them into the grey water below. According to Jeffries''s account, Blanchard was prepared to cut the basket loose and cling to the rigging if necessary. The desperate weight reduction worked. The balloon caught a thermal and rose just enough to clear the French coast, dragging through the treetops of the Felmores forest near Calais before the two men tumbled into a clearing, half-dressed and freezing but alive. They had crossed approximately twenty-five miles of open water in about two and a half hours. The packet of letters they carried became the first international airmail delivery in history. The achievement was greeted with wild celebration in France. Louis XVI awarded Blanchard a pension. The city of Calais erected a monument. Jeffries, a Boston-born physician and committed Loyalist who had served as a surgeon for the British Army during the American Revolution, received somewhat less recognition in his home country. The flight proved that national boundaries meant nothing to the air, a principle that would reshape warfare, commerce, and politics once powered flight arrived a century later. Every transatlantic flight, every international air route, and every aerial border crossing traces its lineage to two shivering men in a wicker basket over the English Channel.