There was a flying craze in France and Scotland with James Tytler, Scotland's first aeronaut and the first Briton to fly, but even so and after a year since the invention of the balloon, the English were still sceptical, and so George Biggin and 'Vincent' Lunardi, "The Daredevil Aeronaut," together decided to demonstrate a hydrogen balloon flight at the Artillery Ground of the Honourable Artillery Company in London on 15 September 1784.

[1] Because the 200,000-strong crowd (which included eminent statesmen and the Prince of Wales) had grown very impatient, the young Italian had to take off without his friend Biggin, and with a bag that was not completely inflated; he was accompanied by a dog, a cat and a caged pigeon.

The flight from the Artillery Ground travelled in a northerly direction towards Hertfordshire, with Lunardi touching down briefly in a cornfield in the parish of North Mymms to release the cat which had become unwell.

There is a commemorative stone in Welham Green, almost three miles to the north-west of the North Mymms landing spot, at a road junction called Balloon Corner.

On 5 October 1785, a large and excited crowd filled the grounds of George Heriot's School in Edinburgh to see Lunardi's first Scottish hydrogen-filled balloon take off.

At the time, The Scots Magazine reported: 'The beauty and grandeur of the spectacle could only be exceeded by the cool, intrepid manner in which the adventurer conducted himself; and indeed he seemed infinitely more at ease than the greater part of his spectators.'

The weather was fine at about 14:00 on 23 November 1785 when The Daredevil Aeronaut 'ascended into the atmosphere with majestic grandeur, to the astonishment and admiration of the spectators' from St. Andrew's Square in Glasgow.

A couple of weeks later, in early December, a local man called Lothian Tam became entangled in the ropes and as the balloon ascended—again from St. Andrew's Square in Glasgow, was lifted 6 metres before being cut loose and falling—with apparently no serious injury.

The diary of the Rev John Mill from Shetland states: 'A French man called Lunardi fled over the Firth of Forth in a Balloon, and lighted in Ceres parish, not far from Cupar, in Fife; and O!

A short time later, Lunardi published An Account of five Aerial Voyages in Scotland (1786), written as a series of letters to his guardian, Gherardo Campagni.

[12] He was portrayed by Laurence Olivier in the 1936 film Conquest of the Air and celebrated musically in Lunardi's flight : a rondo for the harpsichord by the Scottish/Italian composer Domenico Corri.