Page:Wonderful Balloon Ascents, 1870.djvu/36

18 this effect, at least, is found in several historians. We have, however, no direct proof of the fact.

The Abbé Deforges, of Etampes, announced in the journals in 1772 that he would perform the great feat. On the appointed day multitudes of the curious flocked to Etampes. The abbé's machine was a sort of gondola, seven feet long and about two feet deep. Gondola, conductor, and baggage weighed in all 213 pounds. The pious man believed that he had provided against everything. Neither tempest nor rain should mar his flight, and there was no chance of his being upset; whilst the machine, he had decided, was to go at the rate of thirty leagues an hour.

The great day came, and the abbé, entering his air-boat amidst the applause of the spectators, began to work the wings with which it was provided with great rapidity. "But," says one who witnessed the feat, "the more he worked, the more his machine cleaved to the earth, as if it were part and parcel of it."

Retif de la Brétonne, in his work upon this subject, gives the accompanying picture of a flying man, furnished with very artistically designed wings, fitting exactly to the shoulders, and carrying a basket of provisions, suspended from his waist; and the frontispiece of the "Philosophie sans Prétention" is a view of a flying-machine. In the midst of a frame of light wood sits the operator, steadying himself with one hand, and with the other turning a cremaillère, which appears to give a very quick rotatory movement to two glass globes revolving upon a vertical axis. The friction of the globes is supposed to develop electricity to which his power of ascending is ascribed.

To wings, however, aerial adventurers mostly adhered. The Marquis de Racqueville flew from a window of his