United States or Solomon Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In recording this dawn of a new era, however, we should certainly not forget how, across the Atlantic, had arisen a Rumford and a Franklin, whose labours were destined to throw an all-important sidelight on the pages of progress which we have now to chronicle. It was a November night of the year 1782, in the little town of Annonay, near Lyons.
The triumph was achieved by Stephen and Joseph Montgolfier, sons of a wealthy paper-maker who dwelt at Annonay, on the banks of a rivulet which flows into the Rhone, not far from Lyons. These brothers were remarkable men. Although bred in a remote provincial town, and without the benefit of a liberal education, they were possessed in a high degree of ingenuity and the spirit of observation.
The great desire was to rival Montgolfier, although neither the report nor the letters from Annonay had made mention of the kind of gas used by that experimenter to inflate his balloon.
The new idea had now passed the frontiers of France, in which it was originally conceived, and among the other nations, as at first in France, the power of the inflated balloon came to be tested everywhere by the construction of small toy globes. It was just about five months after the first experiment at Annonay viz., on the 25th of November, 1783 that the first balloon ascended in London.
M. de La Peyrouse had scarcely commenced the preparations for his fatal voyage, when, on the 5th of June, 1783, the States of the Vivarais, assembled in the little town of Annonay, were invited by MM. de Montgolfier, proprietors of a large paper-manufactory, to be witnesses of an experiment in physics. The crowd thronged the thoroughfare.
Passing Serrieres, with pastures and meadows close to the water's edge, and groups of cattle grazing under the trees, we reach Annonay, crested by a quaint ruin, the birth-place of the great balloonists, the brothers Montgolfier. The first balloon ascent was made from this little town in 1783. Boissy d'Anglas, the heroic president of the Assembly in its stormiest days, was also born here.
At the same time, Montgolfier was busy constructing, at the request of the Academy of Sciences, a balloon seventy feet high and forty in diameter, with which it was proposed to repeat the experiment of Annonay. He took up his quarters in the magnificent gardens of his friend Reveillon, proprietor of the royal manufactory of stained paper in the Faubourg St. Antoine.
Word Of The Day