Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
On a frosty December morning in 1783, some 400,000 people gathered in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris to see the world’s first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon. Jacques Charles and his assistant, Nicolas-Louis Robert, ascended 1,800 feet into the sky accompanied by a mercury barometer, some sandbags, and a few bottles of champagne.
“Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off,” Charles later wrote. “I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles for ever.”
Back on the ground, feelings were more ambivalent. Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France, watched the scene from his carriage. A cynical companion remarked, “What’s the use of a balloon?” Franklin, aghast, replied, “What’s the use of a newborn baby?”
His point: You’re not thinking big enough.
When Joseph Banks, then the president of England’s Royal Society, first got word in a letter from Franklin about the balloons, he too demanded to know their practical applications. There were some obvious implementations—geographical mapping and military reconnaissance sprung first to mind—but he questioned whether ballooning could otherwise “prove beneficial either to society or science.” Banks proposed one such practical use-case: a system using balloons to reduce the load on horse-pulled wagons. The idea was that broad-wheeled wagons, which normally would require eight horses to draw, would need just two using such a method.
Franklin, with a bit more foresight, argued ballooning could “pave the way to some discoveries in Natural Philosophy of which at present we have no conception.” He compared ballooning to “magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.”
The Small Thinking That Plagued Ballooning Also Plagues VR
Like those hydrogen balloons, small thinking has plagued the development of one of today’s flashiest technologies, virtual reality devices. When Oculus, the company that (literally) kickstarted the new VR revolution, originally pitched its device as a “headset designed specifically for video games that will change the way you think about gaming forever,” hardly anyone—least of all gamers—questioned the idea that VR should be anything other than a high-end gaming accessory. Like a new graphics card or a better TV, it would be a logical, utilitarian improvement to current display technology for games—a horse-drawn carriage, now improved with balloons.
We’ve had a few years to get used to the idea of VR, and some have started getting a little more high-minded about its possibilities. WIRED has been eager to lead the charge, as when it declared a few months ago that VR will “change gaming, movies, TV, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education, and reality.” Of course, it always has been the tendency of magazines to breathlessly celebrate new technologies. In a 1788 article, Gentleman’s Magazine (the first periodical to use the word “magazine” to describe itself) celebrated the advent of hydrogen ballooning as “the most magnificent and astonishing discovery that has been made for many ages, or perhaps since the creation.” Time, Gentleman’s Magazine assured its readers, would reveal the utility of ballooning experiments.
Now, though, even the most breathlessly optimistic VR fanboys can’t help but ask: What will be “the killer app” for these new devices? (Palmer Luckey’s Franklin-esque response? “What’s the real world’s killer app?”)
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