Background - It would seem that in the Summer and Fall of 1895, the Philadelphia Inquirer was sending aloft a Balloon with gondola and pilor as an advertising gimmick to increase circulation on a daily basis.
That the balloon itself, no pictures that I can find, in the summer months was sending aloft some paid acrobats, perhaps from the circus, who alighted from the basket, in form of these two characters / performers / "aeronauts" of "Professor Windoily" and "Professor Rubeneck" with a parachute and floated to earth in various parts of the city. The crowds would spot and follow these performers, one performer at a time on any given day, and the person or persons who first reached them on the ground once they landed were entitled to 5 dollars, a big piece of chump change in those days, when these performers and their escorts reached the Inquirer offices downtown at 11th and Chestnut sts..
After the summer, the advertisement gimmick was, it appears, to drop leaflets from them to the city from the balloon with numbers on them that won the 5 dollar prize for finding the right piece of floating trash from the air with the right number.
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