On a seaside holiday at Calais with his family in August 1869, French chemist and meteorologist Gaston Tissandier chanced to see a poster advertising a balloon launch from the central square the next day, as part of festivities celebrating Emperor Napoleon III. Going straight to the aeronaut’s hotel, he talked himself onto the voyage. Undaunted by wild nightmares of bursting balloons, his family’s strident pleas not to risk his life, and the blinding storm battering the coast, Tissandier arrived at the launch site at dawn, equipped only with life vests purchased from the Calais Humane Society. Despite a small trial balloon smashing into a bell tower and then being flung by the storm out over the wide expanse of the North Sea, the intrepid aeronauts jump into the wicker basket, a military band strikes up a march, and off the Neptune rises, 4,000 feet in a single bound.