HOT AIR BALLOONS ON TOKENS

Last week we published Joel Orosz's article on famous numismatists who rode in balloons. David Powell writes:

Going Down like a Lead Balloon - well, here is one

Well, here is a first; a hot air balloon on a lead token. Fig.1 is 4.32gm in weight and 22mm across, yet from its subject matter it cannot presumably be earlier than the Montgolfier experiments of 1783. The English Channel was crossed in 1785, and presumably knowledge of the feat, and interest in the subject, spread in Britain, to urban centres at least, fairly quickly. This is a Thames find; quite likely it is a ticket for a close-up view of an ascent, probably in the Greater London area, very much along the lines of the ticket for a public hanging shown on page 4 of LTT_60.

The only other token issuer I can think of who depicted a balloon is the flamboyant businessman Isaac Earlysman Sparrow {b. Deptford 1793, d. London 1830}, who issued a number of fairly common advertising pieces, commonly construed as unofficial farthing tokens, in the mid-1820s {Fig.2}. Sparrow, an ironmonger who in 1826 also produced a leather sauce, presumably some kind of polish or preservative, was obsessed with balloons; on 23 June 1823 he went up in one with Charles Green, a famous 19th century aeronaut, and boasted about it ever after. All known varieties of his tokens depict a balloon, and his premises in Bishopsgate were shortly afterwards named Balloon House.

Sparrow was twice afflicted by bankruptcy during his last few years and one must wonder to what extent his ballooning interests were responsible for that. Could he, or would he, have issued lead tokens, either before his copper ones, or after his financial difficulties, when he was less affluent? His copper pieces are all around 23mm, only a millimetre or so larger than Fig.1, which might also have passed for a farthing; but the characters on the back of the lead piece are indistinct, and if initials contain nothing which might pass as an I or an S.

To read the complete issue, see:
Leaden Tokens Telegraph July/Aug 2014 (www.mernick.org.uk/leadtokens/newsletters/LTT1407_98.pdf)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
BALLOONING NUMISMATISTS (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n52a15.html)

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