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Updated: May 7, 2025
We submitted our project to Laplace, who received it with ardour, procured the necessary funds, and the Government confided to us two this important mission. M. Biot, I, and the Spanish commissary Rodriguez departed from Paris in the commencement of 1806.
M. Biot narrates that, in his young days, when aeronautic ascents were less known than they are in these times, there was in the plain of Grenelle, at the mill of Javelle, an establishment where balloons were constantly maintained for the accommodation of amateurs of both sexes who wished to make ascents in what were called "ballons captifs," or balloons anchored, so to speak, to the earth by means of long ropes They were for a considerable time the rage of fashionable society, and it is not recorded that any accidents resulted from the practice.
V. His Faults in Policy crystallized about one: for, while he subdued the serf-mastering nobility, he struck no final blow at the serf-system itself. Our running readers of French history need here a word of caution. They follow De Tocqueville, and De Tocqueville follows Biot in speaking of the serf-system as abolished in most of France hundreds of years before this.
But Biot and De Tocqueville take for granted a knowledge in their readers that the essential vileness of the system, and even many of its most shocking outward features, remained. Richelieu might have crushed the serf-system, really, as easily as Louis X. and Philip the Long had crushed it nominally. This Richelieu did not. And the consequences of this great man's great fault were terrible.
About 1801 there appeared in the Bulletin des Sciences, an exact solution of the problem of the distribution of electric fluid on a spheroid, obtained by Biot, by the application of the peculiar methods which Laplace had invented for the problem of the figure of the planets.
Even during the reign of terror, astronomy was not neglected. Afterwards, in 1796, the National Institute, richly endowed, proposed considerable premiums. France can now boast of two young geometricians, BIOT and PUISSON, who, for analytical genius, surpass all that exist in Europe. It is rather extraordinary that, with the exception of Mr. CAVENDISH and Dr.
He knows that I cannot abide stars, having very good reason to hate them, as you shall hear: In 1807, being attached to the Bureau of Longitudes, I was part of the scientific expedition sent to Spain, under the direction of my friend and colleague, Jean-Baptiste Biot, to determine the arc of the terrestrial meridian from Barcelona to the Balearic isles.
But all the compliments I have received from Arago, De la Place, and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth or the confirmation of a calculation by experiment. This, then, is the core of the whole matter as regards science. It must be cultivated for its own sake, for the pure love of truth, rather than for the applause or profit that it brings.
Anticipating a little the order of dates, let us compare this advice with what occurred: I went to Toulouse, underwent the examination, and was admitted; one year and a half afterwards I filled the situation of secretary at the Observatory, which had become vacant by the resignation of M. Méchain's son; one year and a half later, that is to say, four years after the Perpignan "horoscope," associated with M. Biot, I filled the place, in Spain, of the celebrated academician who had died there, a victim to his labours.
Now, all such reasoning and from such data must, of course, be simply analogical. The greatest height ever reached by man was that of 25,000 feet, attained in the aeronautic expedition of Messieurs Gay-Lussac and Biot.
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