The nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us

Juvenal Urbino’s remark that “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us” gives the city’s first balloon airmail flight a meaning beyond its technological novelty: while the balloon carries the promise of a new century, his words suggest that the city remains trapped in the old one.

Occasion and Delivery

The remark came during public celebrations for the turn of the century, at the launch of an ambitious balloon journey organized through Juvenal Urbino’s initiative. A journalist from the Commercial Daily asked him for his final words in case he died during the adventure. Urbino answered without pausing to devise a safer or more flattering response, and the comment earned him considerable abuse.

Meaning in the Flight

The balloon carried the first airmail toward San Juan de la Ciénaga. Urbino and Fermina Daza, who had experienced flight at the World’s Fair in Paris, were among its first passengers. The journey succeeded without incident, making Urbino’s prediction of danger less immediate than his judgment of the society beneath them. The flight embodied innovation, but his remark cast doubt on whether that innovation meant the city itself had entered a new age.

Historical Contrast

From above, the passengers saw the ruins of Cartagena de Indias: its walls remained intact, while brambles filled the streets, vegetation overtook fortifications, and plague-struck figures lay within the city’s decaying palaces. The view sharpened the remark’s contrast between aerial progress and historical decline. The balloon could cross the landscape; the people and institutions below seemed unable to leave the nineteenth century behind.

Narrative Significance

The line is both a public pronouncement and an ironic measure of the occasion. A ceremony meant to celebrate a new century becomes an occasion to expose the distance between technological spectacle and civic renewal. The flight reaches its destination peacefully, but the remark lingers as a diagnosis of a city whose past remains visible even from the sky.