NOW A FEW WORDS FROM LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY

A London Trial Balloon:

France gave us the ton; and as yet we have not come up to our model. Their monarch is so struck with the heroism of two of his subjects who adventured their persons in two of these new floating batteries that he has ordered statues of them…

 All this may be very important: to me it looks somewhat foolish. Very early in my life, I remember this town at gaze on a man who flew down a rope from the top of St. Martin’s steeple; now, late in my day, people are staring at a voyage to the moon. The former Icarus broke his neck at a subsequent flight; when a similar accident happens to modern knights-errant, adieu to air balloons...

Well! I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and the idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science. 

- - Horace Walpole 1783