16th march 2005
balloons of doom

On August 22, 1849, the Austrians, who controlled much of Italy at this time, launched some 200 pilotless balloons against the city of Venice.

Even earlier in 1806, Napoleon - having lost maritime control over the European seas - employed an engineer named Pasquale Andrioni, working on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in the Venetian lagoon, to build one of a projected ten giant balloons capable of each lifting 700 hundredweight* for use in the aerial invasion of the British Isles. Thousands came to see the launch, but the balloon was unable to take off and eventually the scheme was abandoned.

* The heaviest payload lifted by balloon has been the astronomical observatory Stratoscope II (1971) weighing 3.5 tons (70 hundredweight).

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