Balloon Jumping

If you weigh 150 pounds and desire to have fun, you should strap to your back a balloon lifting 100 pounds. Then you are ready to indulge in the sport of balloon jumping.

Walk along the ground with a breeze at your back, approach a fence, bend your knees, spring lightly into the air when you feel the tug of the balloon. You will sail over the fence so easily and land so gently that you will be surprised. Barns and trees can be surmounted with more vigorous leaps, usually requiring a light second push-up with the tip of the toe on the barn's roof or on the tree's outlying branches.

Balloon jumping is already a popular sport among the English gentry, and is attracting the attention of playful Long Islanders.

In the August issue of the Forum, Frederick S. Hoppin gives an able description of balloon jumping, looks into the future: "Why should we not in time perfect a moderate sized knapsack filled with some highly volatile non-inflammable gas which, strapped comfortably to our back, would be able to lift some 20, 30, or 40 pounds off our burden of flesh? ... If we should ever have knapsacks of unlimited power, our whole present day world will be turned upI side down. ... All the legislatures will be busily engaged in passing laws prohibiting people from leaving the earth too freely, or rules for the right of way up and down and sideways, or regulations against landing on the head of a fellow citizen or planting a foot on any part of him as you rise. And then there will be all the new rules of etiquette: should you pass over or around a lady?"