Links for April

Balloon Riots, AI Crime, Witches, Honor Killing, Inflation, Hysteria, etc.

Thanks for reading! Here’s some items of interest from around the interwebs.

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Balloon Riots

Ever heard of the Great Balloon Riot of 1864? (h/t Bradley Campbell). A crowd had gathered in Leicester, England to watch an aviation pioneer fly his balloon. According to the balloonist, a disgraceful rabblerouser “by his gestures and foul language…excited the mob and induced the belief that there existed on my part a disinclination to ascend.” As the crowd jostled him, he decided he was actually going to call it off and deflated the balloon. Then the crowd really went nuts, tore his balloon to shreds, and tried to beat him up.  

The weirdest thing is that this was not the only balloon riot on record. Ben Franklin’s daughter observed one in Paris:

“The balloon took fire and the experiment did not succeed… The people were furious and threw themselves upon the Balloon, and tore it in pieces each one carrying off a sample; some large enough to make a mattress and I believe the author would have been subjected to the same fate if they had not been escorted by a detachment of French Guards.”

And in 1858 a crowd in Melbourne attacked a balloon that set down in their working-class neighborhood: “[The] distinguished guests were forced to escape by jettisoning champagne bottles, picnic hampers, several bags of sand ballast, and finally throwing off a few hardy objectors still clinging to the sides of the basket.”