trial balloon

Calque of French ballon d’essai (“small balloon released into the sky to determine the direction and tendency of winds in the upper air before a manned ascent in a larger balloon; (figuratively) prospective action to test acceptance”): ballon (“balloon”), essai (“trial, try; assay”).

• ""The originality of the plan and views of the author [Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent], and, above all, the perfect independence of its execution," are, according to the narrator in the Bulletin, the chief features of this new production; and the summary sketch of it which has been published, is (to use the phraseology of the same writer) "as a kind of trial balloon," launched with the view of seeing how the wind sits for his "great work.""
• "If any stronger presumption that his brochure is a trial-balloon of the present ministry be required, it will be found in the pages 19 and 20, wherein Sir Howard Douglas and Mr. Bliss receive a full volley of foul-mouthed Billingsgate."
• "Hints—trial-balloons he [Joseph René Bellot] called them—are adroitly thrown out in the newspapers, and one or two articles from his pen appear in the periodicals. When the public mind, as he judges, is prepared, he addresses the Minister officially on the subject."
• "The other two productions of the press quoted at the commencement are of the fugitive pamphlet sort, to be considered as a sort of literary trial-balloons, thrown out to see if the current of opinion sets fairly for their makers to follow on with larger, or, as sometimes happens, to attract the public gaze to the makers of the new literary bubbles."
• "Possibly the story is given out tentatively by way of testing the public mind—as a species of "trial balloon," if we may borrow a French term for this sort of experimentation with public sentiment."
• "Congressman Cordell Hull, onetime Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, last week issued a statement, as a sort of trial balloon no doubt, linking the high tariff with failure to get 100 cents on a dollar in payment on War debts from Europe."
• "If the Board had the right which it claims to divest the Court of its jurisdiction, then the Board's orders would become nothing more than trial balloons. If they met with no opposition they would be enforced. If the respondent had the means and the inclination to oppose the Board, and set up meritorious defenses, the cases could be taken back for more careful consideration."
• "Mr. Chairman, is there any truth at all to the growing suspicion that you people are sending up a trial balloon with these rumors of the President's death? To see just how much political mileage there is in it, if any?"
• "Publishers frequently used subscription announcements as trial balloons. If they failed to elicit much response, they would drop the project, having lost only a pittance for the publication of the prospectus or having gained a ransom from some competitor who took them seriously."
• "No one in the day-to-day hustle of e-commerce talks very seriously about the kind of trial-balloon gimmicks that claim to revolutionise the last mile: deliveries by drones and parachutes and autonomous vehicles, zeppelin warehouses, robots on sidewalks."

• ballon d'essai
• feeler