A closer look
Thousands of angry citizens rioted in Leicester in 1864, destroying property and setting fires simply because a highly anticipated hot air balloon failed to launch. The inventor Henry Coxwell had brought his magnificent new balloon to a local festival, but the crowd got impatient during the inflation process, broke through the barriers, and started tearing the expensive silk envelope to shreds. Coxwell narrowly escaped with his life as the mob turned into a savage pack of feral animals, enraged by the lack of mid-nineteenth-century airborne entertainment. They completely dismantled his equipment, burned the gondola, and rioted through the streets because they felt personally victimized by a minor delay in a physics demonstration. Nothing says civilized Victorian society quite like burning down your own town over a deflated bag of hot air
