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The family had long been famous for its development of the paper trade, and the many ingenious uses to which they put its staple. Just as the tanners of the fabled town in the Middle Ages thought there was "nothing like leather" with which to build its walls and gates, thereby giving a useful phrase to literature, so the Montgolfiers thought of everything in terms of paper.
The matter was taken up on its scientific side very early in America, experiments in Philadelphia being almost simultaneous with those of the Montgolfiers in France.
The balloon of to-day the balloon in which Coxwell and Glaisher have made their perilous trips into the remote regions of the air is in almost every respect the same as the balloon with which "the physician Charles," following in the footsteps of the Montgolfiers, astonished Paris in 1783. There are few more tantalising stories in the annals of invention than this.
The adventurers were cordially welcomed by the ecclesiastics and the magistrates of the place, and after a time they, with their balloon, were carried back on men's shoulders to Dijon. Experiment in Montgolfiers Roziers and Proust The Duke of Chartres The Comte d'Artois Voyage of the Abbe Carnus to Rodez.
And no sooner had the news of the Montgolfiers' success reached Paris than a subscription was raised, and M. Charles, Professor of Experimental Philosophy, was appointed, with the assistance of M. Roberts, to superintend the construction of a suitable balloon and its inflation by the proposed new method.
An enormous bag, formed of a light canvas lined with paper, began to swell slowly before the curious eyes of the public; all at once the cords which held it were cut, and the first balloon rose majestically into the air. Successive improvements made in the Montgolfiers' original invention permitted bold physicists ere long to risk themselves in a vessel attached to the air-machine.
It was hurried along by the wind; but its buoyant force being soon spent, it remained suspended only ten minutes, and fell gently in a vineyard at a distance of about a mile and a half from the place of its ascension. So memorable a feat lighted up the glow of national vanity, and the two Montgolfiers were hailed and exalted by the spontaneous impulse of their fellow-citizens."
In these latter the gas escaped, and Cavallo was about to try goldbeaters' skin at the time that the Montgolfiers came into the field with their hot air balloon.
But do the many tales of sorcerers in the Middle Ages, who rose from the ground with their cloaks apparently filled with wind, to awe the rabble, suggest that they had deduced the principle of the aerostat from watching the action of smoke as did the Montgolfiers hundreds of years later?
Again, as the atmosphere is always moving in currents more or less strong, the balloon follows the direction of the current of the stratum of air in which it finds itself. Thus we see how simply the ascent of Montgolfiers, and their motions, are explained. It is the same with gas-balloons.
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