This etching by George Cruikshank, "Air-um Scare-um Travelling," from The Comic Almanack (1843), satirizes speculative hopes for balloon flight. The banners hanging from the departure-tower advertise pleasure trips from England to suitably fashionable and exotic locales: daily to Peking, Canton, Mont Blanc, and "every quarter hour" to the birthplace of modern ballooning, Paris. In the lower-left background, one flying machine explodes in mid-air.