The first of these was Pilâtre de Rosier, a gentleman of scientific attainments, who was to conduct the machine, and he was accompanied by the Marquis d'Arlandes, an officer in the Guards. They ascended in the presence of the Court of France, and all the scientific men in Paris. They had several narrow escapes of the whole machine taking fire, but eventually returned to the ground in safety. Both these courageous men came to untimely ends subsequently. Pilâtre de Rosier, admiring the success of the balloon afterward made by Professor Charles, and others, (viz., a balloon filled with hydrogen gas), conceived the idea of uniting the two systems, and accordingly ascended with a large balloon of that kind, having a small fire-balloon beneath it—the upper one to sustain the greater portion of the weight, the lower one to enable him to alter his specific gravity as occasion might require, and thus to avoid the usual expenditure of gas and ballast. Right in theory—but he had forgotten one thing. Ascending too high, confident in his theory, the upper balloon became distended too much, and poured down a stream of hydrogen gas, in self-relief, which reached the little furnace of the fire-balloon, and the whole machine became presently one mass of flame. It was consumed in the air, as it descended, and with it of course, the unfortunate Pilâtre de Rosier. The untimely fate of the Marquis d'Arlandes, his companion in the first ascent ever made in a balloon, was hastened by one of those circumstances which display the curious anomalies in human nature;—he was broken for cowardice in the execution of his military duties, and is supposed to have committed suicide.
If we consider the shape, structure, appurtenances, and capabilities of a ship of early ages, and one of the present time, we must be struck with admiration at the great improvement that has been made, and the advantages that have been obtained; but balloons are very nearly what they were from the first, and are as much at the mercy of the wind for the direction they will take. Neither is there at present any certain prospect of an alteration in this condition. Their so-called "voyage" is little more than "drifting," and can be no more, except by certain manœuvres which obtain precarious exceptions, such as rising to take the chance of different currents, or lowering a long and weighty rope upon the earth (an ingenious invention of Mr. Green's, called the "guide rope"), to be trailed along the ground. If, however, man is ever to be a flying animal, and to travel in the air whither he listeth, it must be by other means than wings, balloons, paddle-machines, and aerial ships—several of which are now building in America, in Paris, and in London. We do not doubt the mechanical genius of inventors—but the motive power. We will offer a few remarks on these projects before we conclude.
But let us, at all events, ascend into the sky! Taking balloons as they are, "for better, for worse," as Mr. Green would say—let us for once have a flight in the air.
The first thing you naturally expect is some extraordinary sensation in springing high up into the air, which takes away your breath for a time. But no such matter occurs. The extraordinary thing is, that you experience no sensation at all, so far as motion is concerned. So true is this, that on one occasion, when Mr. Green wished to rise a little above a dense crowd, in order to get out of the extreme heat and pressure that surrounded his balloon, those who held the ropes, misunderstanding his direction, let go entirely, and the balloon instantly rose, while the aeronaut remained calmly seated, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, after the exertions he had undergone in preparing for the flight, and totally unconscious of what had happened. He declares that he only became aware of the circumstance, when, on reaching a considerable elevation (a few seconds are often quite enough for that), he heard the shouts of the multitude becoming fainter and fainter, which caused him to start up, and look over the edge of the car.
A similar unconsciousness of the time of their departure from earth has often happened to "passengers." A very amusing illustration of this is given in a letter published by Mr. Poole, the well-known author, shortly after his ascent. "I do not despise you," says he, "for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures; and I, in the days of my ignorance, thought with the rest of you. I know better now. The fact is, we do not go up at all; but at about five minutes past six on the evening of Friday, the 14th of September, 1838—at about that time, Vauxhall Gardens, with all the people in them, went down!" What follows is excellent. "I can not have been deceived," says he; "I speak from the evidence of my senses, founded upon repetition of the fact. Upon each of the three or four experimental trials of the powers of the balloon to enable the people to glide away from us with safety to themselves—down they all went about thirty feet?—then, up they came again, and so on. There we sat quietly all the while, in our wicker buck-basket, utterly unconscious of motion; till, at length, Mr. Green snapping a little iron, and thus letting loose the rope by which the earth was suspended to us—like Atropos, cutting the connection between us with a pair of shears—down it went, with every thing on it; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town, (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it), having been placed on casters for the occasion—I am satisfied of that—was gently rolled away from under us."[13]
Feeling nothing of the ascending motion, the first impression that takes possession of you in "going up" in a balloon, is the quietude—the silence, that grows more and more entire. The restless heaving to and fro of the huge inflated sphere above your head (to say nothing of the noise of the crowd), the flapping of ropes, the rustling of silk, and the creaking of the basketwork of the car—all has ceased. There is a total cessation of all atmospheric resistance. You sit in a silence which becomes more perfect every second. After the bustle of many moving objects, you stare before you into blank air. We make no observations on other sensations—to wit, the very natural one of a certain increased pulse, at being so high up, with a chance of coming down so suddenly, if any little matter went wrong. As all this will differ with different individuals, according to their nervous systems and imaginations, we will leave each person to his own impressions.
So much for what you first feel; and now what is the first thing you do? In this case every body is alike. We all do the same thing. We look over the side of the car. We do this very cautiously—keeping a firm seat, as though we clung to our seat by a certain attraction of cohesion—and then, holding on by the edge, we carefully protrude the peak of our traveling-cap, and then the tip of the nose, over the edge of the car, upon which we rest our mouth. Every thing below is seen in so new a form, so flat, compressed and simultaneously—so much too-much-at-a-time—that the first look is hardly so satisfactory as could be desired. But soon we thrust the chin fairly over the edge, and take a good stare downward; and this repays us much better. Objects appear under very novel circumstances from this vertical position, and ascending retreat from them (though it is they that appear to sink and retreat from us). They are stunted and foreshortened, and rapidly flattened to a map-like appearance; they get smaller and smaller, and clearer and clearer. "An idea," says Monck Mason, "involuntarily seizes upon the mind, that the earth with all its inhabitants had, by some unaccountable effort of nature, been suddenly precipitated from its hold, and was in the act of slipping away from beneath the aeronaut's feet into the murky recesses of some unfathomable abyss below. Every thing, in fact, but himself, seems to have been suddenly endowed with motion." Away goes the earth, with all its objects—sinking lower and lower, and every thing becoming less and less, but getting more and more distinct and defined as they diminish in size. But, besides the retreat toward minuteness, the phantasmagoria flattens as it lessens—men and women are of five inches high, then of four, three, two, one inch—and now a speck; the Great Western is a narrow strip of parchment, and upon it you see a number of little trunks "running away with each other," while the Great Metropolis itself is a board set out with toys; its public edifices turned into "baby-houses, and pepper-casters, and extinguishers, and chess-men, with here and there a dish-cover—things which are called domes, and spires, and steeples!" As for the Father of Rivers, he becomes a dusky-gray, winding streamlet, and his largest ships are no more than flat pale decks, all the masts and rigging being foreshortened to nothing. We soon come now to the shadowy, the indistinct—and then all is lost in air. Floating clouds fill up all the space beneath. Lovely colors outspread themselves, ever-varying in tone, and in their forms or outlines—now sweeping in broad lines—now rolling and heaving in huge, richly, yet softly-tinted billows—while sometimes, through a great opening, rift, or break, you see a level expanse of gray or blue fields at an indefinite depth below. And all this time there is a noiseless cataract of snowy cloud-rocks falling around you—falling swiftly on all sides of the car, in great fleecy masses—in small snow-white and glistening fragments—and immense compound masses—all white, and soft, and swiftly rushing past you, giddily, and incessantly down, down, and all with the silence of a dream—strange, lustrous, majestic, incomprehensible.
Aeronauts, of late years, have become, in many instances, respectable and business-like, and not given to extravagant fictions about their voyages, which now, more generally, take the form of a not very lively log. But it used to be very different when the art was in its infancy, some thirty or forty years ago, and young balloonists indulged in romantic fancies. We do not believe that there was a direct intention to tell falsehoods, but that they often deceived themselves very amusingly. Thus, it has been asserted, that when you attained a great elevation, the air became so rarefied that you could not breathe, and that small objects, being thrown out of the balloon, could not fall, and stuck against the side of the car. Also, that wild birds, being taken up and suddenly let loose, could not fly properly, but returned immediately to the car for an explanation. One aeronaut declared that his head became so contracted by his great elevation, that his hat tumbled over his eyes, and persisted in resting on the bridge of his nose. This assertion was indignantly rebutted by another aeronaut of the same period, who declared that, on the contrary, the head expanded in proportion to the elevation; in proof of which he stated, that on his last ascent he went so high that his hat burst. Another of these romantic personages described a wonderful feat of skill and daring which he had performed up in the air. At an elevation of two miles, his balloon burst several degrees above "the equator" (meaning, above the middle region of the balloon), whereupon he crept up the lines that attached the car, until he reached the netting that inclosed the balloon; and up this netting he clambered, until he reached the aperture, into which he thrust—not his head—but his pocket handkerchief! Mr. Monck Mason, to whose "Aeronautica" we are indebted for the anecdote, gives eight different reasons to show the impossibility of any such feat having ever been performed in the air. One of these is highly graphic. The "performer" would change the line of gravitation by such an attempt: he would never be able to mount the sides, and would only be like the squirrel in its revolving cage. He would, however, pull the netting round—the spot where he clung to, ever remaining the lowest—until having reversed the machine, the balloon would probably make its escape, in an elongated shape, through the large interstices of that portion of the net-work which is just above the car, when the balloon is in its proper position! But the richest of all these romances is the following brief statement:—A scientific gentleman, well advanced in years (who had "probably witnessed the experiment of the restoration of a withered pear beneath the exhausted receiver of a pneumatic machine") was impressed with a conviction, on ascending to a considerable height in a balloon, that every line and wrinkle of his face had totally disappeared, owing, as he said, to the preternatural distension of his skin; and that, to the astonishment of his companion, he rapidly began to assume the delicate aspect and blooming appearance of his early youth!
These things are all self-delusions. A bit of paper or a handkerchief might cling to the outside of the car, but a penny-piece would, undoubtedly, fall direct to the earth. Wild birds do not return to the car, but descend in circles, till, passing through the clouds, they see whereabouts to go, and then they fly downward as usual. We have no difficulty in breathing; on the contrary, being "called upon," we sing a song. Our head does not contract, so as to cause our hat to extinguish our eyes and nose; neither does it expand to the size of a prize pumpkin. We see that it is impossible to climb up the netting of the balloon over-head, and so do not think of attempting it; neither do we find all the lines in our face getting filled up, and the loveliness of our "blushing morning" taking the place of a marked maturity. These fancies are not less ingenious and comical than that of the sailor who hit upon the means of using a balloon to make a rapid voyage to any part of the earth. "The earth spins round," said he, "at a great rate, don't it? Well, I'd go up two or three miles high in my balloon, and then 'lay to,' and when any place on the globe I wished to touch at, passed underneath me, down I'd drop upon it."
But we are still floating high in air. How do we feel all this time? "Calm, sir—calm and resigned." Yes, and more than this. After a little while, when you find nothing happens, and see nothing likely to happen (and you will more especially feel this under the careful conduct of the veteran Green), a delightful serenity takes the place of all other sensations—to which the extraordinary silence, as well as the pale beauty and floating hues that surround you, is chiefly attributable. The silence is perfect—a wonder and a rapture. We hear the ticking of our watches. Tick! tick!—or is it the beat of our own hearts? We are sure of the watch; and now we think we can hear both.