Wonderful Balloon Ascents; Or, The Conquest of the Skies

years, they see men confiding themselves in a swinging car into the immensities of space, what must have been the astonishment of those who, for the first time since the commencement of the world, beheld one of their fellow-creatures rolling in space, without any other assurance of safety than what his still dim perception of the laws of nature gave him? Why should we be obliged here to state that the great discovery that stirred the spirits of men from the one end of Europe to the other, and gave rise to hopes of such vast discoveries, should have failed in realising the expectations which seemed so clearly justified by the first experiments? It is now eighty-six years since the first aerial journey astonished the world, and yet, in 1870, we are but little more advanced in the science than we were in 1783. Our age is the most renowned for its discoveries of any that the world has seen. Man is borne over the surface of the earth by steam; he is as familiar as the fish with the liquid element; he transmits his words instantaneously from London to New York; he draws pictures without pencil or brush, and has made the sun his slave. The air alone remains to him unsubdued. The proper management of balloons has not yet been discovered. More than that, it appears that balloons are unmanageable, and it is to air-vessels, constructed more nearly upon the model of birds, that we must go to find out the secret of aerial navigation. At present, as in former times, we are at the mercy of balloons--globes lighter than the air, and therefore the sport and the prey of tempests and currents. And aeronauts, instead of showing themselves now as the benefactors of mankind, exhibit themselves mainly to gratify a frivolous curiosity, or to crown with eclat a public fete. Chapter II. Attempts in Ancient Times to Fly in the Air. Before contemplating the sudden conquest of the aerial kingdom, as accomplished and proclaimed at the end of the last century, it is at once curious and instructive to cast a glance backward, and to examine, by the glimmering of ancient traditions, the attempts which have been made or imagined by man to enfranchise himself from the attraction of the earth. “The greater number of the arts and sciences can be traced along a chronological ladder of great length: some, indeed, lose