The Balloonist of Bull Run
A Novel of the Union's First Air Corps

About this book:

**The Balloonist of Bull Run** launches you into the perilous birth of American aerial warfare, where the battlefield is the sky and the weapon is sight itself. In June 1861, as the Union fractures and green regiments crowd the streets of Washington, Professor Thaddeus Lowe arrives with a silk sphere, a telegraph key, and a radical conviction: that the man who owns the view owns the victory. From the gaslit workshops of Philadelphia to the muddy Mall beneath the unfinished Capitol dome, Lowe battles bureaucrats, skeptics, and the brutal physics of hydrogen to convince a desperate President that a balloon is not a carnival trick—it is the eye the army lacks.

With Lincoln’s blessing, Lowe and his intrepid crew ascend five hundred feet above the Potomac, threading a copper lifeline to the War Department and transmitting the first aerial telegram in history. Below, the Confederate lines stir in the Virginia woods; ahead lies Manassas, where blind generals will march thousands into slaughter. Rich with the smell of coal gas and varnished silk, the crackle of Morse code, and the thunder of approaching battle, this is historical fiction at its most visceral—where science meets courage, and one stubborn aeronaut drags a nineteenth-century war kicking into the modern age.

Perfect for readers of Michael Shaara, Robert Harris, and Ken Follett, *The Balloonist of Bull Run* is a soaring debut that turns a forgotten chapter of the Civil War into a high-stakes thriller of innovation, politics, and the terrifying clarity of seeing too much, too soon.