Chapter 22

hurt. The balloon and car were then brought to England, and exhibited at the Crystal Palace at the end of 1863 and beginning of 1864. The two ascents of Nadar's balloon excited an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm and interest, vastly out of proportion to what they were entitled to. Nadar's idea was to obtain sufficient money, by the exhibition of his balloon, to carry out a plan of aerial locomotion he had conceived possible by means of the principle of the screw; in fact, he spoke of ``Le Geant'' as ``the last balloon.'' He also started L'Aeronaute, a newspaper devoted to aerostation, and published a small book, which was translated into English under the title The Right to Fly. Directly after Nadar's two ascents, Eugene Godard constructed a fire-balloon of nearly half a million cubic feet capacity--more than double that of Nadar's and only slightly less than that attributed to the ``Flesselles'' of 1783. The air was heated by an 18-ft. stove, weighing, with the chimney, 980 lb. This furnace was fed by straw; and the ``car'' consisted of a gallery surrounding it. Two ascents of this balloon, the first fire-balloon seen in London, were made from Cremorne Gardens in July 1864. After the first journey the balloon descended at Greenwich, and after the second at Walthamstow, where it was injured by being blown against a tree. Notwithstanding its enormous size, Godard asserted that it could be inflated in half an hour, and the inflation at Cremorne did not occupy more than an hour. In spite of the rapidity with which the inflation was effected, few who saw the ascent could fail to receive an impression unfavourable to the fire-balloon in the matter of safety, as a rough descent, with a heated furnace as it were in the car, could not be other than most dangerous.

Long balloon voyages.

In the summer of 1873 the proprietors of the New York Daily Graphic, reviving a project discussed by Green in 1840, determined to construct a very large balloon, and enable the American aeronaut, John Wise, to realize his favourite scheme of crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, by taking advantage of the current from west to east which was believed by many to exist constantly at heights above 10,000 ft. The project came to nothing owing to the quality of the material of which the balloon was made. When it was being inflated in September 1873 a rent was observed after 325,000 cub. ft. of gas had been put in, and the whole rapidly collapsed. The size was said to be such as to contain 400,000 cub. ft., so that it would lift a weight of 14,000 lb. No balloon voyage has yet been made of a length comparable to the breadth of the Atlantic. In fact only two voyages exceeding 1000 m. are on record--that of John Wise from St Louis to Henderson, N.Y., 1120 m., in 1859, and that of Count Henry de la Vaulx from Paris to Korosticheff in Russia, 1193 m., in 1900. On the 11th of July 1897 Salomon Andree, with two companions, Strendberg and Frankel, ascended from Spitzbergen in a daring attempt to reach the North Pole, about 600 m. distant. One carrier pigeon, apparently liberated 48 hours after the start, was shot, and two floating buoys with messages were found, but nothing more was heard of the explorers.

Scientific Ascents.

At an early date the balloon was applied to scientific purposes. as far back as 1784, Dr Jeffries made an ascent from London in which he carried out barometric, thermometric and hygrometric observations, also collecting samples of the air at different heights. In 1803 the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, entertaining the opinion that the experiments made on mountain-sides by J. A. Deluc, H. B. de Saussure, A. von Humboldt and others must give results different from those made in free air at the same heights, resolved to arrange a balloon ascent. Accordingly, on the 30th of January 1808, .Sacharof, a member of the academy, ascended in a gas balloon, in company with a French aeronaut, E. G. Robertson, who at one time gave conjuring entertainments in Paris. The ascent was made at a quarter past seven, and the descent effected at a quarter to eleven. The height reached was less than 1 1/2