on water. Albert of Saxony, who was bishop of Halberstadt from 1366 to 1390, had a similar notion, and considered that a small portion of the principle of fire enclosed in a light sphere would raise it and keep it suspended. The same speculation was advanced by Francis Mendoza, a Portuguese Jesuit, who died in 1626 at the age of forty-six, and by Gaspar Schott (1608–1666), also a Jesuit and professor of mathematics at Würzburg, though for fire he substituted the thin ethereal fluid which he believed to float above the atmosphere. So late as 1755 Joseph Galien (1699–1782), a Dominican friar and professor of philosophy and theology in the papal university of Avignon, proposed to collect the diffuse air of the upper regions and to enclose it in a huge vessel extending more than a mile every way, and intended to carry fifty-four times as much weight as did Noah’s ark. A somewhat different but equally fantastic method of making heavy bodies rise is quoted by Schott from Lauretus Laurus, according to whom swans’ eggs or leather balls filled with nitre, sulphur or mercury ascend when exposed to the sun. Laurus also stated that hens’ eggs filled with dew will ascend in the same circumstances, because dew is shed by the stars and drawn up again to heaven by the sun’s heat during the day. The same notion is utilized by Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) in his romances describing journeys to the moon and sun, for his French traveller fastens round his body a multitude of very thin flasks filled with the morning’s dew, whereby through the attractive power of the sun’s heat on the dew he is raised to the middle regions of the atmosphere, to sink again, however, on the breaking of some of the flasks.
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| Fig. 1.—Lana’s Aeronautical Machine. |
A distinct advance on Schott is marked by the scheme for aerial navigation proposed by the Jesuit, Francis Lana (1631–1687), in his book, published at Brescia in 1670, Prodromo ovvero Saggio di alcune invenzioni nuove promesso all’ Arte Maestra. His idea, though useless and unpractical in so far that it could never be carried out, is yet deserving of notice, as the principles involved are sound; and this can be said of no earlier attempt. His project was to procure four copper balls of very large dimensions (fig. 1), yet so extremely thin that after the air was exhausted from them they would be lighter than the air they displaced and so would rise; and to those four balls he proposed to attach a boat, with sails, &c., which would carry up a man. He submitted the whole matter to calculation, and proposed that the globes should be about 25 ft. in diameter and 1225th of an inch in thickness; this would give from all four balls a total ascensional force of about 1200 ℔, which would be quite enough to raise the boat, sails, passengers, &c. But the obvious objection to the whole scheme is, that it would be quite impossible to construct a globe of so large a size and of such small thickness which would even support its own weight without collapsing if placed on the ground, much less bear the external atmospheric pressure when the internal air was removed. Lana himself noticed this objection, but he thought that the spherical form of the copper shell would, notwithstanding its extreme thinness, enable it, after the exhaustion was effected, to sustain the enormous pressure, which, acting equally on every point of the surface, would tend to consolidate rather than to break the metal. His proposal to exhaust the air from the globes by attaching to each a tube 36 ft. long, fitted with a stopcock, and so producing a Torricellian vacuum, suggests that he was ignorant of the invention of the air-pump by Otto von Guericke about 1650.
We now come to the invention of the balloon, which was due to Joseph Michel Montgolfier (1740–1810) and Jacques Étienne Montgolfier (1745–1799), sons of Pierre Montgolfier, a large and celebrated papermaker at Annonay, a town about 40 m. from Lyons. The brothers had observed the suspension of clouds in the atmosphere, Invention
of the
balloon.and it occurred to them that if they could enclose any vapour of the nature of a cloud in a large and very light bag, it might rise and carry the bag with it into the air. Towards the end of 1782 they inflated bags with smoke from a fire placed underneath, and found that either the smoke or some vapour emitted from the fire did ascend and carry the bag with it. Being thus assured of the correctness of their views, they determined to have a public ascent of a balloon on a large scale. They accordingly invited the States of Vivarais, then assembled at Annonay, to witness their aerostatic experiment; and on the 5th of June 1783, in the presence of a considerable concourse of spectators, a linen globe of 105 ft. in circumference was inflated over a fire fed with small bundles of chopped straw. When released it rapidly rose to a great height, and descended, at the expiration of ten minutes, at the distance of about 112m. This was the discovery of the balloon. The brothers Montgolfier imagined that the bag rose because of the levity of the smoke or other vapour given forth by the burning straw; and it was not till some time later that it was recognized that the ascending power was due merely to the lightness of heated air compared to an equal volume of air at a lower temperature. In this balloon, no source of heat was taken up, so that the air inside rapidly cooled, and the balloon soon descended.
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| Fig. 2.—Charles’ and Robert’s Balloon. |
The news of the experiment at Annonay attracted so much attention at Paris that Barthelemi Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819), afterwards professor of geology at the Musee d’Histoire Naturelle, set on foot a subscription for paying the expense of repeating the experiment. The balloon was constructed by two brothers of the name of Robert, under the superintendence of the physicist, J. A. C. Charles. The first suggestion was to copy the process of Montgolfier, but Charles proposed the application of hydrogen gas, which was adopted. The filling of the balloon, which was made of thin silk varnished with a solution of elastic gum, and was about 13 ft. in diameter, was begun on the 23rd of August 1783, in the Place des Victoires. The hydrogen gas was obtained by the action of dilute sulphuric acid upon iron filings, and was introduced through leaden pipes; but as the gas was not passed through cold water, great difficulty, was experienced in filling the balloon completely; and altogether about 500 ℔ of sulphuric acid and twice that amount of iron filings were used (fig. 2). Bulletins were issued daily of the progress of the inflation; and the crowd was so great that on the 26th the balloon was moved secretly by night to the Champ de Mars, a distance of 2 m. On the next day an immense concourse of people covered the Champ de Mars, and every spot from which a view could be obtained was crowded. About five o’clock a cannon was discharged as the signal for the ascent, and the balloon when liberated rose to the height of about 3000 ft. with great rapidity. A shower of rain which began to fall directly after it had left the earth in no way checked its progress; and the excitement was so great, that thousands of well-dressed spectators, many of them ladies, stood exposed, watching it intently the whole time it was in sight
