On this Day in Past- Aug 17, 1859: U.S. Airmail Carried by Balloon

1859: Mail is carried by air for the first time in the United States.

On a hot summer day as the temperature soared toward 91 degrees, John Wise stood at the town square in Lafayette, Indiana, waiting next to a balloon named Jupiter. Even for a balloon enthusiast and a well-known aeronaut, it was a big moment.

Wise was set to carry what would be the first U.S. airmail. A postmaster had handed him a bag with 123 letters. Destination of the balloonist and his precious cargo: New York City.

Delivering letters by air had been attempted before. There had always been carrier pigeons. And in 1785, a balloon flight from Dover, England, to Calais, France, had carried mail.

Wise’s attempt was to be the big event for the United States. Wise, who was 51, was also hoping to set a record for the longest balloon flight. He took off at 2 p.m.

But the weather wasn’t on his side. He found that the wind was blowing southwest, not east. Still, he went up to 14,000 feet. But five hours — and just 30 miles later — Wise gave up and landed in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

The mail had gone partway by air, but was ignominiously put on a train to New York City to assure the swift completion of its appointed round.

The Lafayette Daily Courier mocked the flight as “trans-county-nental.”

A month later, Wise tried again. This time he made it as far as Henderson, New York — flying nearly 800 miles. A storm forced a crash landing, and he lost the mail in the crash.

The first airmail flight in an airplane took place nearly 50 years later, when three letters were carried a few miles between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, California, in February 1911.

A piece of mail from Wise’s first flight has survived over the decades and now resides at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. The letter bearing a 3-cent stamp (about 80 cents in today’s buying power) was sent to the address: “W H Munn, No. 24 West 26 St., N York City.”

John Wise continued to take to the air. He flew observation balloons for the Union Army during the Civil War. He died in 1879 at 71, when a storm pushed his balloon into Lake Michigan.

Source: Various

Photo: A crowd gathers in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1859 to watch a balloon ascend with the first U.S. mail carried by air.