Ask most people how Phileas Fogg circled the globe in Jules Verne’s classic, and they will tell you he did it in a hot air balloon. It is one of the most persistent literary myths in popular culture, and the phrase “around the world in 80 days balloon” gets searched constantly by readers trying to track down the scene. Here is the surprising truth: the balloon never appears in Verne’s novel at all.
As a crew that flies balloons for a living, we get a kick out of untangling this one. It says something about how deeply balloons are wired into our idea of adventure that millions of people misremember a book because of an image that feels like it should be there. The idea of an around the world in 80 days balloon has become so familiar that it feels almost heretical to say it is not real.
What Jules Verne Actually Wrote
Published in 1873, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days follows the meticulous Englishman Phileas Fogg, who wagers his fellow club members that he can circumnavigate the globe in exactly eighty days. He and his resourceful valet, Passepartout, make the journey using the transportation of the era: steamships, railways, a sledge, and even an elephant through India. Not once does a hot air balloon lift them anywhere. Verne was writing a story grounded in the real, newly connected transportation networks of the 1870s, chiefly the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroads, and a balloon crossing would have undercut the point he was making about how small and interconnected the modern world had become.
So Where Did the Around the World in 80 Days Balloon Come From?
The myth traces back to Hollywood. The lavish 1956 film adaptation, produced by Michael Todd and starring David Niven as Fogg, opens with Fogg and Passepartout escaping Paris in a hot air balloon after a wager goes sideways. That sequence, sweeping and unforgettable, is a screenwriter’s invention, not a translation of Verne’s text. But it worked. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and its balloon imagery became so iconic that it fused with the story in the public imagination. Decades of posters, book covers, and even later adaptations have echoed that balloon, cementing an association that has outlived most people’s memory of the actual plot.
It is a great example of how a single striking visual in film can rewrite how we remember a story. Ask someone to picture Around the World in Eighty Days and the balloon usually arrives before the elephant does, even though the elephant is the one that is actually in the book.
Why Balloons Make Such Perfect Adventure Symbols
Even if Verne did not write a balloon into his story, it is easy to see why filmmakers reached for one. A balloon rising silently over rooftops captures the romance of exploration in a way a train or steamship never quite can.
- Balloons move with the wind rather than fighting it, which reads on screen as freedom rather than machinery.
- They offer a sweeping, elevated view of the landscape below, ideal for establishing a sense of scale and distance.
- They are quiet and slow, which lets a scene breathe and lets an audience take in scenery rather than action.
- Ballooning predates most other forms of powered travel, giving it an old-world, storybook quality.
Those same qualities are exactly why the around the world in 80 days balloon scene has stuck in the popular imagination long after 1956, and why productions still come looking for balloon crews and dramatic aerial visuals whenever a script calls for something that feels timeless. If you are producing a project that needs balloons on screen, our film and television balloon services team has worked on shoots that needed exactly that kind of imagery, from period pieces to modern commercials.
The Real History of Ballooning Around Verne’s Era
It is worth remembering that ballooning was already more than eighty years old by the time Verne wrote his novel. The Montgolfier brothers launched the first manned hot air balloon flight in France in 1783, and by the mid-1800s balloons had been used for scientific observation, military reconnaissance, and public spectacle across Europe and the United States. Verne himself was fascinated by ballooning and had already written an entire earlier novel about it, Five Weeks in a Balloon, published in 1863. So the association between Verne and balloons is not baseless. It is just attached to the wrong book. The balloon novel exists. It simply is not the one about the eighty-day wager.
Chasing That Same Feeling Today
You do not need a Jules Verne plot or a Hollywood budget to feel what that balloon scene promises: a quiet lift into the air, the ground opening up beneath you, and a view that makes the whole world feel a little more within reach. That is the actual experience of a sunrise balloon flight, and it is available a lot closer to home than the Suez Canal. If the myth has you daydreaming about drifting over the countryside at first light, a morning with our crew on one of our sunrise balloon rides is the real version of that fantasy, minus the eighty-day deadline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the book Around the World in Eighty Days actually have a balloon in it?
No. Phileas Fogg travels by steamship, train, sledge, and elephant, among other methods, but never by hot air balloon. The balloon is absent from Jules Verne’s original 1873 text.
Why do so many people think there is a balloon in the story?
The confusion comes largely from the 1956 film adaptation, which opens with a memorable hot air balloon escape scene that was created for the movie and does not appear in the novel.
Did Jules Verne ever write about hot air balloons?
Yes. Verne wrote an earlier novel called Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), which follows an actual balloon expedition across Africa. It is simply a different book from Around the World in Eighty Days.
Has the balloon scene appeared in other adaptations?
Balloon imagery has shown up in various adaptations and homages over the decades, largely because the 1956 film’s version became so iconic that later productions often reference it even when returning to Verne’s original, balloon-free route.
So the next time the movie comes on and that balloon rises over the rooftops of Paris, enjoy it for what it is: a beautiful piece of filmmaking, not a scene from the book. And if it leaves you wanting the real thing, we would be glad to get you up in a basket of your own.
