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308 it is always the fools who finish by being in the right. I had read that Montgolfière was thought a fool, until the day when he stopped his insulters’ mouths by launching the first spherical balloon into the heavens. Without daring to acknowledge it to my family, I was possessed by the idea of myself going up into the air. At the first possible moment, therefore, I went over to France. That country attracted me like an alluring vision. I longed after the land where the first Montgolfière had been sent up in 1783, where the first aëronaut had made his first ascension, where the first hydrogen balloon had been let loose, where first an air-ship had been made to navigate the air with its steam-engine, screw propeller, and rudder. In my heart I had an admiring worship for the four men of genius—Montgolfière, Pilátre de Rozier, the physicist, Charles, and the engineer, Henry Giffard—who have attached their names forever to each of the great steps forward of aërial navigation.

I imagined that the question had made marked progress since Henry Giffard, in 1852, with courage equal to his science, gave his first masterly demonstration of the great problem of directing balloons. On my arrival in Paris, therefore, I asked to be allowed to go up in a dirigible balloon. I confess that I was immensely surprised and disappointed at the answer that there was none—that there were only spherical balloons like, or nearly like, that invented by Charles in 1783!

In fact, no one had continued the trials of an elongated balloon driven by a thermic motor, as begun by Henry Giffard. The trials of such balloons with an electric motor, undertaken by the Tissandier brothers, in 1883, had been repeated by only two constructors, in the following year, and had been finally given up in 1885. For twelve years no one had seen ‘‘long balloons’’ in the air.

I at once thought of taking up the tradition, broken for nearly half a century: I did not delay for a single moment with the idea of an electric motor, which offers little danger, it is true, but which, on the other hand, has the capital ballooning defect of being the heaviest known motor, counting the weight of its battery. I decided to go back to the thermic motor, but to replace the steam-engine by a petroleum motor, which at that time (1897) was having great success in French automobiles.

In spite of certain secondary advantages offered by the electric motor, I could not understand how any one could apply it to