Jean-Pierre Blanchard had a rather poor business sense and was heavily in debt when he married Sophie in 1804. The couple believed that a female balloonist would attract the crowds and help make enough money to rid them of their financial woes. Consequently, Jean-Pierre took Sophie up for her first ascent in a balloon on December 27, 1804 at Marseilles.

This is the story of perhaps the most remarkable couple in the history of aviation and certainly the bravest woman of the balloon age. Sophie Blanchard was born Marie Madeleine-Sophie Armant on March 25, 1778 to unremarkable French parents. She would probably have died in obscurity, but for her marriage to Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a French inventor, who had abandoned his first wife and four children in order to pursue ballooning. Jean-Pierre was born on July 7, 1753. He made his first ascent in a hydrogen balloon on March 2, 1784 and later became the world’s first professional balloonist. The first successful manned balloon flight had taken place just a few months earlier on November 21, 1783 when two Frenchmen got airborne in a tethered hot air balloon constructed by the famous Montgolfier brothers.

In 1785, Jean-Pierre demonstrated the parachute as a means of safely abandoning a balloon, a dog being the passenger. Early parachutes were cumbersome, made of linen stretched over a wooden frame. Jean-Pierre, however, made his from folded silk—taking advantage of the strong and lightweight material to produce more compact parachutes. In 1793, his balloon ruptured and he used a parachute to escape death.