Bel of the ball
ON August 10, 1784, a thick crowd gathered in Five Fields, an open valley on the western outskirts of London, to watch an adventurer, the Chevalier de Moret, take to the skies with his hot-air balloon. People roared in excitement as the fire was lit up, but their enthusiasm quickly turned to rage when the balloon, painted gold and filled with artificial flowers for added spectacle, failed to inflate. They didn’t take the failure kindly: the balloon went up in smoke, the mob wrecked the surroundings and de
