The troubled flight of Trump's trial balloons

Gaza, Greenland, Canada, Panama...and the Kennedy Center?

A 1783 drawing by Claude Louis Desrais.

In the early 1780s, two brothers in southeastern France began experimenting with balloons, looking for a way to reliably lift them to the skies. Joseph Montgolfier took note of his wife’s blouse “inflating when she hung it over the hearth to dry,” as Richard Holmes noted in his book, “The Age of Wonder.”

So Joseph and his brother Étienne, who were in the paper business, used hot air to lift the ballon made of linen and paper that they launched on June 5, 1783 in Annonay, south of Lyon. The balloon, 30 feet high and 110 feet around, soared to a height of about 6,000 feet.

On September 19 that year, the Montgolfiers staged a remarkable show in front of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the rest of the royal court at Versailles: Their elaborately decorated balloon lifted a wicker basket with a sheep, a duck and a cockerel, and all three animals survived the eight-minute flight.

It proved that earthbound life could tolerate higher altitudes, and th…