After generations of trial and error, mostly error, man’s age old dream of flying was realized near the end of the eighteenth century in the form of the hot air balloon. This was followed by several decades where daring aeronauts gave play to their imaginations by constructing ever more fanciful contraptions and performing increasingly startling feats before gaping audiences.
"While some were dreaming of flying like a bird, others preferred to take it one step at a time and simply try to lift into the air. The idea of using Archimedes’ buoyancy principle to rise in the atmosphere by creating an object lighter than the air it displaces had been introduced in 1670 by a Jesuit priest, Father Francesco de Lana of Brescia, Italy. De Lana suggested (in print) that copper could be used to create spheres thin enough to be light- weight yet strong enough to be evacuated of all air, thereby making the total sphere lighter than the air the sphere displaced. The theory was sound, but producing sufficiently light spheres that would not collapse under the pressure of the air proved too difficult."
On a November afternoon in 1783, two spirited young Frenchmen departed this planet from the Bois de Boulogne. Their twenty-five minute feat was unprecedented; it ushered in the age of space travel. Joy, gaiety and spontaneous enthusiasm reigned. Hundreds of thousands had witnessed the marvel: some wept in an agony of apprehension, while the two aeronauts yet floated in their balloon; some fell to their knees in prayer; all, as the ballon glided grandly to its landing, cheered themselves hoarse. The American envoy, Benjamin Franklin, was there. Later, someone asked him of what use was a balloon. ” Of what use,” Franklin retorted, “is a new-born baby”.
"Upon pouring our grape juice, we were regaled with a story that when balloons were newly invented in France, some peasants had attacked one when it landed, thinking it was an intruder from another world. From then on, we were told, balloonists started carrying champagne to show farmers that they were actually from Earth, and even France, and therefore not Dangerous Aliens. From there the legend grew into a tradition, and balloonists apparently now celebrate a successful flight with champagne, and give some to the property owners to thank them for use of the landing spot."
The hang-up, in the past, that stymied Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci and Swedenborg, was their stubbornness in clinging to mechanical devices with flapping wings; over the centuries this led to dozens of men, endowed with more pluck than logic, plunging to their death, martyrs to the principle of wings. Even those who deprecated the notion of flight, like the essayist Joseph Addison, protested, because they argued, the skill would entail a bird brain and, as well, the alleged promiscuity of a bird. “it would fill the world with innumerable immoralities,” Addison wrote, “The cuppola of Saint Paul’s would be covered with both sexes like the outside of a pigeon house”.
"For such an experiment to take place required the permission of the King himself and Louis, concerned by the possible risk to one of his subjects, decreed that two convicts should make the ascent. (If they survived they would be granted a royal pardon, and if they didn't...) The Montgolfier brothers were dismayed by this proposal and after much discussion with the court officials persuaded the king to relent and on 21 November 1783 a brightly decorated balloon rose above an ecstatic Parisian crowd bearing aloft the first aeronauts — the first humans to fly — Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes."
The balloon’s inventor was Joseph Montgolfier, elder son of a paper manufacturer. Both Joseph and his brother Etienne had grapled for some time with the mystery of flying. They were familiar with Joseph Priestley’s ” Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air” , and Joseph had tinkered with parachutes, successfully dropping a sheep from a tower under a rig designed like a parasol. But it was looking at an engraving showing the French and Spanish besieging the British at Gibralter that gave him the idea of storing smoke; an observation that could be made in the age of reason.
"Hot air balloons were invented in 1783 by two French brothers, Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier. They were very wealthy paper makers. When they how paper rose with the hot air in a chimney, they thought that a paper balloon filled with hot air might also fly."
Their first test of a linen and paper balloon proved air worthy, at least for ten minutes. The physicist Charles thought that hydrogen, a recent discovery of Henry Cavendish would prove more adequate than Montgolfier’s straw and wool blend that fed their fire. Unlike the open necked Montgolfiere, the first Charliére was closed by a valve to contain the gas. Word of Charles’s strange undertaking swept over the city: when the ballon was transported by night through the streets to the Champs des mars, the people bared their heads and knelt in wonder as it went by under armed guard.
Next afternoon cannon boomed, heralding the ascension, and all Paris exulted. The ballon rose and sailed away, out of sight. Somewhere aloft, the expanding hydrogen tore a rent in the taffeta. It floated down in farm country, scaring the peasants out of their wits. They summoned the parish priest to exorcise ” the writhing demon from the clouds” with bell, book and candle; when this recipe was unavaling, they dispatched it with scythe, flail, and blunderbuss.
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November. 1783. Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes wave from the gallery of their montgolfiere as they set out from Paris.
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