M. de Rozier cried: "You are doing nothing, and we are not rising." I stirred the fire and then began to scan the river, but Pilatre again cried: "See the river. We are dropping into it!" We again urged the fire, but still clung to the river bed. Presently I heard a noise in the upper part of the balloon, which gave a shock as though it had burst. I called to my companion: "Are you dancing?" The balloon by this time had many holes burnt in it and using my sponge I cried that we must descend. My companion however explained that we were over Paris and must now cross it; therefore raising the fire once more we turned south till we passed the Luxembourg, when, extinguishing the flames, the balloon came down spent and empty.
If poor Pilatre played the part of a rather nervous man in this narrative he had the nerve still to go on with his aeronautical experiments to the point of death. In 1785 he essayed the crossing of the English Channel in a balloon of his own design, in which he sought to combine the principles of the gas and hot-air balloons. It appears to have been something like an effort to combine nitro-glycerine with an electric spark. At any rate the dense crowds that thronged the coast near Boulogne to see the start of the "Charles—Montgolfier"—as the balloon was named after the originators of the rival systems—saw it, after half an hour's drift out to sea, suddenly explode in a burst of flame. De Rozier and a friend who accompanied him were killed. A monument still recalls their fate, which however is more picturesquely recorded in the signs of sundry inns and cafés of the neighbourhood which offer refreshment in the name of Les Aviateurs Perdus.
Thereafter experimenters with balloons multiplied amazingly. The world thought the solution of the problem of flight had been found in the gas bag. Within two months a balloon capable of lifting eighteen tons and carrying seven passengers ascended three thousand feet at Lyons, and, though sustaining a huge rent in the envelope, because of the expansion of the gas at that height, returned to earth in safety. The fever ran from France to England and in 1784, only a year after the first Montgolfier experiments, Lunardi, an Italian aeronaut made an ascension from London which was viewed by King George III. and his ministers, among them William Pitt. But the early enthusiasm for ballooning quickly died down to mere curiosity. It became apparent to all that merely to rise into the air, there to be the helpless plaything of the wind, was but a useless and futile accomplishment. Pleasure seekers and mountebanks used balloons for their own purposes, but serious experimenters at once saw that if the invention of the balloon was to be of the slightest practical value some method must be devised for controlling and directing its flight. To this end some of the brightest intellects of the world directed their efforts, but it is hardly overstating the case to say that more than a century passed without any considerable progress toward the development of a dirigible balloon.
Charles's Balloon.
But even at the earlier time it was evident enough that the Quaker philosopher, from the American Colonies, not yet the United States, whose shrewd and inquiring disposition made him intellectually one of the foremost figures of his day, foresaw clearly the great possibilities of this new invention. In letters to Sir Joseph Banks, then President of the Royal Society of London, Franklin gave a lively account of the first three ascensions, together with some comments, at once suggestive and humorous, which are worth quoting:
Some think [he wrote of the balloon] Progressive Motion on the Earth may be advanc'd by it, and that a Running Footman or a Horse slung and suspended under such a Globe so as to have no more of Weight pressing the Earth with their Feet than Perhaps 8 or 10 Pounds, might with a fair Wind run in a straight Line across Countries as fast as that Wind, and over Hedges, Ditches and even Waters. It has been even fancied that in time People will keep such Globes anchored in the Air to which by Pullies they may draw up Game to be preserved in the Cool and Water to be frozen when Ice is wanted. And that to get Money it will be contriv'd, by running them up in an Elbow Chair a Mile high for a guinea, etc., etc.
With his New England lineage Franklin could hardly have failed of this comparison: "A few Months since the Idea of Witches riding through the Air upon a broomstick, and that of Philosophers upon a Bag of Smoke would have appeared equally impossible and ridiculous."
To-day when aircraft are the eyes of the armies in the greatest war of history, and when it appears that, with the return of peace, the conquest of the air for the ordinary uses of man will be swiftly completed, Franklin's good-humoured plea for the fullest experimentation is worth recalling. And the touch of piety with which he concludes his argument is a delightful example of the whimsical fashion in which he often undertook to bolster up a mundane theory with a reference to things supernatural.