The first balloon ride

On July 12, 1785, thousands of people gathered at the Malieveld in The Hague for a special event. The stadtholder had invited the famous aviation pioneer Pierre Blanchard for a balloon flight. Hundreds of curious spectators bought tickets to witness the spectacle up close. But filling the balloon took much longer than expected, and the crowd grew increasingly impatient. It wasn’t until evening that Blanchard was ready to take off.

Meanwhile, things on the ground got tense. Two officers argued over who would join the flight, and the dispute escalated into a fight. Blanchard decided to go alone and set course for Zevenhuizen. Half an hour later, he landed in a meadow. Local farmers, who had never seen anything like it, panicked. Mistaking the strange aircraft for a monster, they attacked him with pitchforks. Blanchard barely managed to escape. Back in The Hague, he was hailed as a hero. He had made history as the first person to complete a manned balloon flight in the Netherlands.

Two years earlier, mechanic Diller had launched an unmanned balloon in the Princess Garden, shortly after the Montgolfier brothers' first flight in France. In 1807, Blanchard made another flight from the Netherlands, this time with his wife, Madeleine Armant. They lifted off from the grounds of Huis ten Bosch, once again marking a milestone in aviation history.