Trial balloon

For many weeks in succession the little trial balloons thrown up to show the course of the wind were driven back upon the shores of France.

A small trial balloon was then sent up and its course followed by a thousand eyes. In one bound it flew against the bell-tower of the town-house, then rose again and made directly for the Northern Ocean.

In the same year the brothers Montgolfier were carrying on their experiments at Annonay. Their first serviceable balloon—the outcome of various attempts—was made of linen and lined with paper. [...] The excitement caused by the new-fangled machine soon spread to Paris, where many scientific men turned their attention to the subject. Among them was M. [Jacques] Charles, who was led to experiment with hydrogen. He manufactured a small trial balloon of silk, which he covered with an elastic varnish, and he had the satisfaction of seeing it rise up in the air, until it disappeared in the clouds.

That day, in order to get a little recreation, Pierre drove out to the village of Vorontsovo to see a great air-balloon, which Leppich had built for the destruction of the enemy, and a trial balloon, which was to be let off on the next day.

Whenever a balloon ascension is to take place M. Rampont, at the Hôtel des Postes, hastens to send off a few trial balloons for the purpose of ascertaining the course of the wind. When the direction is unfavorable the departure is postponed; on the contrary when it is favorable, orders are sent immediately to the station at which the ascension is to take place.

"The originality of the plan and views of the author [Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent], and, above all, the perfect independence of its execution," are, according to the narrator in the Bulletin, the chief features of this new production; and the summary sketch of it which has been published, is (to use the phraseology of the same writer) "as a kind of trial balloon," launched with the view of seeing how the wind sits for his "great work."

If any stronger presumption that his brochure is a trial-balloon of the present ministry be required, it will be found in the pages 19 and 20, wherein Sir Howard Douglas and Mr. Bliss receive a full volley of foul-mouthed Billingsgate.

Hints—trial-balloons he [Joseph René Bellot] called them—are adroitly thrown out in the newspapers, and one or two articles from his pen appear in the periodicals. When the public mind, as he judges, is prepared, he addresses the Minister officially on the subject.

The other two productions of the press quoted at the commencement are of the fugitive pamphlet sort, to be considered as a sort of literary trial-balloons, thrown out to see if the current of opinion sets fairly for their makers to follow on with larger, or, as sometimes happens, to attract the public gaze to the makers of the new literary bubbles.

Possibly the story is given out tentatively by way of testing the public mind—as a species of "trial balloon," if we may borrow a French term for this sort of experimentation with public sentiment.