FRENCH INTELLECTUALS have continued to be fascinated by air and to write about the history of aerial culture and the culture of aerial history. Some Enlightenment rationalists mocked this affinity as typical of an airy nation: in Britain, ‘airy’ becomes ‘airy-fairy’ very readily. That expression, meaning insubstantial, superficial, impractical and foolishly idealistic, carries fears about effeminacy and witchcraft, yet its lightness gestures to a good-humoured enchantment with air too. The British are a nation enthusiastically engaged with air now: seafarers and shopkeepers have become frequent flyers. The French remain the boldest explorers of the aesthetics of air, though artists, photographers and architects worldwide have played with air to see in it new things, subtle forces, expansive and shaped freedoms. Balloons still cross our imagination in particular and colourful ways. Among these are many instances which contain traces of meaning carried over from the eighteenth century, airborne ghosts which help explain why we still love balloons. The aesthetic work balloons do for us has adapted to meet modern ends, made possible by long memories that reach back to the beginnings of balloons in the late eighteenth century. Air has a culture rich, various and persistent.

We know balloons best as toys, little airy spheres that have shed the apparatus to carry humans aloft, except in spirit. They're affordable and disposable – too much so, since cast-away balloons contribute significantly to marine litter. Filled with human breath or by the simplest pumps, they eliminate all dangers other than the way they make us jump when they burst loudly; they expire by withering away, as if naturally. Toy balloons came about because new materials enabled cheap, safe mass production. Rubber balloons, first devised by Michael Faraday in 1824, were sold as toys in 1825; vulcanised rubber balloons, the prototype of toy balloons, were manufactured by a London company in 1847.