Page:Wonderful Balloon Ascents, 1870.djvu/54

 CHAPTER V.

SECOND EXPERIMENT.

(Charles's Balloon, Paris, Champ de Mars, 27th of August, 1783.)

The indescribable enthusiasm caused by the ascent of the first balloon at Annonay, spread in all directions, and excited the wondering curiosity of the savants of the capital. An official report had been prepared, and sent to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and the result was that the Academy named a commission of inquiry. But fame, more rapid than scientific commissions, and more enthusiastic than academies, had, at a single flight, passed from Annonay to Paris, and kindled the anxious ardour of the lovers of science in that city. The great desire was to rival Montgolfier, although neither the report nor the letters from Annonay had made mention of the kind of gas used by that experimenter to inflate his balloon. By one of the frequent coincidences in the history of the sciences, hydrogen gas had been discovered six years previously by the great English physician Cavendish, and it had hardly even been tested in the laboratories of the chemists when it all at once became famous. A young man well versed in physics, Professor Charles, assisted by two practical men, the brothers Robert, threw himself ardently into the investigation of the modes of inflating balloons with this gas, which was then called inflammable air. Guessing that it was much lighter than that which Montgolfier had been obliged to make use of in his third-rate provincial town, Charles leagued himself with