On September 8, 1785, Thomas Baldwin saw something nobody had ever seen before: the English city of Chester and its surroundings from above. And then he did something nobody had ever done before: He produced maps of what he saw—the very first aerial maps in history. They’re included in Airopaidia, a curious book that devotes hundreds of pages to Baldwin’s one and only balloon trip. People have been flying planes for 117 years. But the history of human flight goes back another 120 years before the Wright Brothers’ first airplane…
