'What use is a newborn baby?' That, the story goes, was Benjamin Franklin's reply in Paris in 1783 when someone asked him what good a balloon could possibly be.
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More amazing facts
- 1778 · 1779 Hawaii was first called the Sandwich Islands — after the same earl as the sandwich.
- 1781 · 1850 Uranus was almost named after an English king.
- 1781 The man who discovered Uranus was a professional musician.
- 1783 The first aeronauts were a sheep, a duck and a rooster.
- 1787 · 1788 British Australia exists partly because of American independence.
- 1787 · 1797 Potemkin's fake villages most likely never existed.