Wise up; it's not going to work

We pick up our story after the Great Western debacle and the limited success of the Union Army Balloon Corps. Neither of these ventures were particularly fruitful. Did that stop a new group of aeronauts from trying anew? Could the American independent spirit of adventure and traversing the troposphere in a basket be stilled?

No.

Famous aeronaut John Wise convinced the Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper, to fund his flight. The newspaper created a massive publicity stunt out of the preparation and launch. 

Throngs in an unending procession came to Broadway and 14th Street where the huge balloon was being made by the Domestic Sewing machine Co. and where a banner announced in bold letters "To Europe in Sixty Hours 1-1 The Great Balloon 1-1 The Daily Graphic" (Stamps, May 29, 1976, p. 663).

The balloon's basket was two floors. The top, ten feet high, was the living quarters outfitted with tables, chairs, and instruments. The bottom, four feet high, was for storage.

John Wise never took the Daily Graphic balloon across the Atlantic. By some accounts he was fired; by others he quit because he felt the balloon was unsafe.  Instead, on September 12, 1873, aeronaut Washington Donaldson and two other men attempted to lift off the ground from Brooklyn but never got anywhere as the balloon's fabric ripped. The Daily Graphic and the men inside were deflated.

Undaunted, on October 10, 1873, aeronaut Washington Donaldson and two other men floated up from Brooklyn to the cheers and cries of an excited crowd, who expected to hear in a couple of days that the Great Balloon had landed in Europe.

The dream that never happened,
from The Philatelist, 1943, p. 218

A few hours later, the balloon made its first and final landing in Connecticut, a few miles short of Europe. There is no extant mail from that excursion. However, there is one cover known from Donaldson's later adventures in P.T. Barnum's circus in which he dropped "Messages from the Clouds."

There are some other collectibles from other transatlantic balloon mail experiments, but by and large these were unmanned, smaller balloons launched in large quantities that included postal cards to be mailed by whomever found them.

Balloon mail now holds its place as a unique, if not practical, form of mail service.