Balloons could get you up in the air, but they weren't steerable. Various inventors tried to build powered airships which could fly anywhere the pilot wished to go, but during the first half of the 19th Century they were stymied by the massive weight and enormous fuel consumption of available engines. Turns out railroad technology isn't easy to repurpose for aviation.
The first airship which could be called steerable was the one constructed by French inventor Henri Giffard in 1852. Giffard's day job was inventing high-efficiency steam engines, so he was able to create a 3-horsepower power plant small enough to be carried aboard a 144-foot airship.
It almost worked. Giffard's airship could turn and go in circles -- but in even a modest breeze it still drifted downwind even with the stoker shoveling coal into the boiler as fast as he could.
Still, for fictional purposes it's not out of the question to imagine that Giffard was able to squeeze a bit more efficiency out of his engine, or use some of that newfangled petroleum as fuel. So 1852 is about the earliest date for a "realistic" powered airship in fiction. You can have passenger-carrying airships in the 1870s, opening the door to daring airship robberies in the Old West, ex-Confederate airship pirates operating out of secret bases in Brazil, and aerial expeditions to lost lands at the poles.
For a slightly more fantastical steampunk airship, consider the Aereon, built by Dr. Solomon Andrews of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1863. It was supposedly a steerable, controllable airship with no engine at all!
Here's how it worked (in theory). Imagine holding a foam kickboard under the water in a swimming pool. It wants to float upward but you're holding it down. If you tilt it slightly and let go, the board shoots off in the direction of the tilt as it rises to the surface. Evidently Solomon Andrews spent some time as a boy fooling around with pine boards down at the swimming hole, because that's exactly how the Aereon was supposed to work.
The airship consisted of multiple balloons held within a light framework, making a broad and flat shape. The intrepid aeronaut rode in a basket underneath, and controlled the gas valves and ballast. Tilt the nose of the ship up in the direction you want to go, drop some sandbags, and shoot away! Once you reach maximum height, tip the nose down, valve some gas, and glide back down again.
Andrews built it, and flew it in front of a large crowd. Witnesses said the Aereon defied the winds and returned to its takeoff point. The trouble is, it shouldn't have worked. Air isn't as dense as water, so there isn't as much resistance, especially at the slow speeds of an ascending gas balloon.
My guess is that Andrews got lucky with the winds on his maiden flight, knew he'd gotten lucky, and that's why he dismantled the Aereon after its test flight and never took it up again. Otherwise he could have made his fortune and reputation as the Father of Aviation forty years before the Wright Brothers and Count Zeppelin.
An alternate history steampunk story can handwave away the petty objections of aeronautical engineers and their so-called "laws of physics" and fill the skies with clean, fuelless Aereons gliding and darting about. The secret of the Aereon can be the MacGuffin that Sinister Forces are desperate to learn or suppress. The relative independence of an Aereon means it's ideal for sky raiders over the Wild West or the high seas.
Next time: where's my flying carriage?
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