The Great Aerial Navigator, Atmospheric Machine!

In 1842—61 years before the Wright brothers’ successful flight in North Carolina—a pair of English lacemakers-turned-inventors patented their design for a powered aircraft that could carry passengers. To fundraise for construction and testing of their Aerial Steam Carriage, William Henson and John Stringfellow staged a publicity campaign that caught the imaginations of early Victorians, many of whom were convinced that the project could succeed. Others, like the makers of this broadside, found the idea ripe for lampooning. The description of this comically complex “Aerial Navigator” remains fairly deadpan, even when explaining that its weight—more than 130 tons when carrying passengers and cargo—is kept airborne by a “subtile and invisible agent, known only to practical chemists, but first combined by the Inventor…”