Flying High: the Women Pioneers of Hot Air Ballooning

Long before a derring-do Phileas Fogg graced the pages of Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’, French women were taking to the skies. The little Ardèchois town of Annonay isn’t the sort of place you’d expect for a world first. Unassumingly cradled between the soft hills of Pilat Regional Park and the Rhône Valley, just south of Lyon, many bypass it entirely as they motor south to the Côte d’Azur. But 240 years ago, this town sparked huge excitement, when brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfière launched the world’s very first hot air balloon flight from their hometown.