car, was rendered unnecessary. As they approached the shore
the balloon rose, describing a magnificent arch high over the
land. They descended in the forest of Guinnes. On the 15th
of June 1785, Pilatre de Rozier made an attempt to repeat the
exploit of Blanchard and Jeffries in the reverse direction,
and cross from Boulogne to England. For this purpose he
contrived a double balloon, which he expected would combine the
advantages of both kinds---a fire-balloon, 10 ft. in diameter,
being placed underneath a gas-balloon of 37 ft. in diameter,
so that by increasing or diminishing the fire in the former
it might be possible to ascend or descend without waste of
gas. Rozier was accompanied by P. A. Romain, and for rather
less than half an hour after the aerostat ascended all seemed
to be going on well, when suddenly the whole apparatus was
seen in flames, and the unfortunate adventurers came to the
ground from the supposed height of more than 3000 ft. Rozier
was killed on the spot, and Romain only survived about ten
minutes. A monument was erected on the place where they fell,
which was near the sea-shore, about 4 m. from the starting-point.
Early large balloons.
The largest balloon on record (if the contemporary accounts
are correct) ascended from Lyons on the 19th of January
1784. It was more than 100 ft. in diameter, about 130 ft. in
height, and when distended had a capacity, it is said, of over
half a million cubic feet. It was called the ``Flesselles''
(from the name of its proprietor, we believe), and after having
been inflated from a straw fire in seventeen minutes, it rose
with seven persons in the car to the height of about 3000
ft., but descended again after the lapse of about a quarter
of an hour from the time of starting, in consequence of a
rent in the upper part. Another large fire-balloon, 68 ft. in
diameter, was constructed by the chevalier Paul Andreani of
Milan, and on the 25th of February he ascended in it from
Milan, remaining in the air for about twenty minutes. This
is usually regarded as the first ascent in Italy (but see
Monck Mason's Aeronautica, p. 247). On the 7th of November
1836, at half-past one o'clock, a large balloon containing
about 85,000 cub. ft. of gas ascended from Vauxhall Gardens,
London, carrying Robert Hollond, M.P., Monck Mason and Charles
Green, and descended about two leagues from Weilburg, in the
duchy of Nassau, at half-past seven the next morning, having
thus traversed a distance of about 500 m. in 18 hours; Liege
was passed in the course of the night, and Coblentz in the early
morning. In consequence of this journey the balloon became
famous as the ``Nassau Balloon'' (fig. 6). Charles Green
(1785-1870), who constructed it and subsequently became its
owner, was the most celebrated of English aeronauts, and made
an extraordinary number of ascents. His first, made from the
Green Park, London, on the 19th of July 1821 at the coronation
of George IV., was distinguished for the fact that for the first
time coal-gas was used instead of hydrogen for inflating the
balloon. In 1828 he made an equestrian ascent from the
Eagle Tavern, City Road, London, seated on his favourite
pony. Such ascents have since been repeated; in 1852 Madame
Poitevin made one from Cremorne Gardens, but was prevented
from giving a second performance by police interference, the
exhibition outraging public opinion. It was in descending
from the ``Nassau Balloon'' in a parachute that Robert
Cocking was killed in 1837 (see PARACHUTE) . Green was the
inventor of the guide-rope, which consists of a long rope
trailing below the car. Its function is to reduce the waste
of gas and ballast required to keep the balloon at a proper
altitude. When a balloon sinks so low that a good deal of
the guide-rope rests on the ground, it is relieved of so
much weight and therefore tends to rise; if on the other
hand it rises so that most of the rope is lifted off the
ground, it has to bear a greater weight and tends to sink.
In 1863 A. Nadar, a Paris photographer, constructed ``Le
Geant,'' which was the largest gas-balloon made up to that
time and contained over 200,000 cub. ft. of gas. Underneath
it was placed a smaller balloon, called a compensator,
the object of which was to prevent loss of gas during the
voyage. The car had two stories, and was, in fact, a model
of a cottage in wicker-work, 8 ft. in height by 13 ft. in
length, containing a small printing-office, a photographic
department, a refreshment-room, a lavatory, &c. The first
ascent took place at five o'clock on Sunday the 4th of
October 1863, from the Champ de Mars. There were thirteen
persons in the car, including one lady, the princess de
la Tour d'Auvergne, and the two aeronauts Louis and Jules
Godard. In spite of the elaborate preparations that had been
made and the stores of provisions that were taken up, the
balloon descended at nine o'clock, at Meaux, the early descent
being rendered necessary, it was said, by an accident to the
valve-line. At a second ascent, made a fortnight later,
there were nine passengers, including Madame Nadar. The
balloon descended at the expiration of seventeen hours, near
Nienburg in Hanover, a distance of about 400 m. A strong wind
was blowing, and it was dragged over the ground for 7 or 8
m. All the passengers were bruised, and some seriously
hurt. The balloon and car were then brought to England,
and exhibited at the Crystal Palace at the end of 1863 and
beginning of 1864. The two ascents of Nadar's balloon excited
an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm and interest, vastly
out of proportion to what they were entitled to. Nadar's
idea was to obtain sufficient money, by the exhibition of his
balloon, to carry out a plan of aerial locomotion he had
conceived possible by means of the principle of the screw; in
fact, he spoke of ``Le Geant'' as ``the last balloon.'' He
also started L'Aeronaute, a newspaper devoted to aerostation,
and published a small book, which was translated into English
under the title The Right to Fly. Directly after Nadar's two
ascents, Eugene Godard constructed a fire-balloon of nearly
half a million cubic feet capacity--more than double that of
Nadar's and only slightly less than that attributed to the
``Flesselles'' of 1783. The air was heated by an 18-ft. stove,
weighing, with the chimney, 980 lb. This furnace was fed
by straw; and the ``car'' consisted of a gallery surrounding
it. Two ascents of this balloon, the first fire-balloon seen
in London, were made from Cremorne Gardens in July 1864.
After the first journey the balloon descended at Greenwich,
and after the second at Walthamstow, where it was injured
by being blown against a tree. Notwithstanding its enormous
size, Godard asserted that it could be inflated in half an
hour, and the inflation at Cremorne did not occupy more than an
hour. In spite of the rapidity with which the inflation was
effected, few who saw the ascent could fail to receive an
impression unfavourable to the fire-balloon in the matter
of safety, as a rough descent, with a heated furnace as it
were in the car, could not be other than most dangerous.
Long balloon voyages.
In the summer of 1873 the proprietors of the New York
Daily Graphic, reviving a project discussed by Green in
1840, determined to construct a very large balloon, and
enable the American aeronaut, John Wise, to realize his
favourite scheme of crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, by
taking advantage of the current from west to east which was
believed by many to exist constantly at heights above 10,000
ft. The project came to nothing owing to the quality of
the material of which the balloon was made. When it was
being inflated in September 1873 a rent was observed after
325,000 cub. ft. of gas had been put in, and the whole rapidly
collapsed. The size was said to be such as to contain 400,000
cub. ft., so that it would lift a weight of 14,000 lb. No
balloon voyage has yet been made of a length comparable to the
breadth of the Atlantic. In fact only two voyages exceeding
1000 m. are on record--that of John Wise from St Louis to
Henderson, N.Y., 1120 m., in 1859, and that of Count Henry
de la Vaulx from Paris to Korosticheff in Russia, 1193 m., in
1900. On the 11th of July 1897 Salomon Andree, with two
companions, Strendberg and Frankel, ascended from Spitzbergen
in a daring attempt to reach the North Pole, about 600 m.
distant. One carrier pigeon, apparently liberated 48 hours
after the start, was shot, and two floating buoys with messages
were found, but nothing more was heard of the explorers.
Scientific Ascents.
At an early date the balloon was applied to scientific
purposes. as far back as 1784, Dr Jeffries made an ascent from
London in which he carried out barometric, thermometric and
hygrometric observations, also collecting samples of the air
at different heights. In 1803 the St Petersburg Academy of
Sciences, entertaining the opinion that the experiments made
on mountain-sides by J. A. Deluc, H. B. de Saussure, A. von
Humboldt and others must give results different from those
made in free air at the same heights, resolved to arrange a
balloon ascent. Accordingly, on the 30th of January 1808,
.Sacharof, a member of the academy, ascended in a gas balloon,
in company with a French aeronaut, E. G. Robertson, who at
one time gave conjuring entertainments in Paris. The ascent
was made at a quarter past seven, and the descent effected
at a quarter to eleven. The height reached was less than 1 1/2
m. The experiments were not very systematically made, and
the chief results were the filling and bringing down of
several flasks of air collected at different elevations,
and the supposed observation that the magnetic dip was
altered. A telescope fixed in the bottom of the car and
pointing vertically downwards enabled the travellers to
ascertain exactly the spot over which they were floating at any
moment. Sacharof found that, on shouting downwards through
his speaking-trumpet, the echo from the earth was quite
distinct, and at his height was audible after an interval
of about ten seconds (Phil. Mag., 1805, 21, p. 193).
Some of the results reported by Robertson appearing doubtful,
Laplace proposed to the members of the French Academy of
Sciences that the funds placed by the government at their
disposal for the prosecution of useful experiments should be
utilized in sending up balloons to test their accuracy. The
proposition was supported by J. A. C. Chaptal, the chemist,
who was then minister of the interior, and accordingly the
necessary arrangements were speedily effected, the charge
of the experiments being given to L. J. Gay-Lussac and J. B.
Biot. The principal object of this ascent was to determine
whether the magnetic force experienced any appreciable diminution
at heights above the earth's surface. On the 24th of August
1804, Gay-Lussac and Biot ascended from the Conservatoire des
Arts at ten o'clock in the morning. Their magnetic experiments
were incommoded by the rotation of the balloon, but they found
that, up to the height of 13,000 ft., the time of vibration
of a magnet was appreciably the same as on the earth's
surface. They found also that the air became drier as they
ascended. The height reached was about 13,000 ft., and the
temperature declined from 63 deg. to 51 deg. F. The descent was
effected about half-past one, at Meriville, 18 leagues from Paris.
In a second experiment, which was made on the 16th of September
1804, Gay-Lussac ascended alone. The balloon left the
Conservatoire des Arts at 9.40 A.M., and descended at 3.45
