IT WAS 1900 AND THE CITY OF PARIS GREETED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WITH THE EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE, A WORLD’S FAIR TO CELEBRATE THE ARTS AND SCIENCES OF THE PAST CENTURY AND TO ANTICIPATE THE WONDERS OF THE NEXT.
Among the many diversions available to visitors was the opportunity to go aloft in a balloon. A photograph taken of one such group of amateur aeronauts shows a group of men in hats and high collars, looking very serious—all except one. This man, Hugh de Laussat Willoughby, stands slightly apart from the others, unable to contain a smile; it radiates from his crinkled eyes, as if going up in a balloon is the greatest lark of his life. For him, that would be saying quite a lot.
Willoughby was born in 1856 to a well-to-do family in Middleton, New York. He studied mining engineering at the University of Pennsylvania but never worked in that field. Independently wealthy, he put his time and money into things that interested him. These included yachting, motorboats, bicycles and aviation. He declared ballooning to be “the king of sports,” but balloons would eventually lose the crown to airplanes.
In 1897 Willoughby made a name for himself as an explorer. He undertook an expedition to sail around the southern tip of Florida through poorly charted waters and little-known islands. He and a guide then took to canoes and crossed back to Miami through the Everglades. In doing so, he became the first non-native to cross this region, though he acknowledged in , his memoir of the
