Another account has Joseph gazing at a painting of the siege of Gibraltar, that three-year failed attempt by Spanish and French forces to take Gibraltar from the British during the American Revolution. The siege was even then under way, and Joseph, a good Frenchman, his mind bent on aiding his country, recalled a past moment watching sparks drawn up a flue. He wondered if men, like sparks, might be drawn up on a draft of air from a fire, up and over the castle walls, thus impregnating impregnable Gibraltar. Flight has always been associated with military conquest.
It was time to perform an experiment. In his rented rooms in Avignon, Joseph stretched a bolt of taffeta around a light wood frame and lit a wad of paper in the cavern of it, and the whole thing floated up to the ceiling. As Charles Coulston Gillispie reports in The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784, Joseph immediately wrote to his brother, Étienne: “Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world.”
Luckily the family business was papermaking, a high-tech industry in the eighteenth century. The brothers set to work experimenting with paper balloons, which became known as Montgolfières, and the hot air that inflated them as Montgolfier gas. Gas, because the brothers had yet to understand that the fire heated the air, and that hot air is lighter than cold air, so it rises. Instead they concluded that the combination of fire and smoke caused a chemical reaction with the air and the resulting gas filled the balloon. No matter how it worked, it worked, and so the brothers partnered with several interested friends, including Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, a successful manufacturer of wallpapers. Surely, writes Gillispie in his book, it is due to the association of Réveillon with the work of the Montgolfiers “that the iconography of balloons has evolved out of the patterning of eighteenth-century wallpaper.”
On that day in Versailles, the brothers planned a public demonstration. They had already put claim to their invention (and so the invention of aviation) with a previous public demonstration, which launched from Annonay on June 4, 1783. But this flight in Versailles would be different. First, the Montgolfier brothers had to contend with the success of another ballooning pair, Jacques Alexandre César Charles and Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, who had only a month before launched a helium-filled balloon from the Champ de Mars. Second, the brothers were to stage this launch before the Royal Palace and before royalty—namely the king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette (not so much later, both would lose their heads to the guillotine). And third, the brothers would raise the stakes by flying a living animal. After some deliberation on what animal to fly (some suggested a dog, so that while ascending into the sky, the crowd of onlookers could hear it bark), the brothers settled on a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The duck and the rooster were control animals for the sheep. The duck was expected to manage the altitude without trouble, but what would happen to the rooster, no one knew. And what happened to that sheep during the flight, a mammal with a physiology not unlike human beings, would be akin to what would happen to a man, so the thinking went. If the sheep came down no worse for wear, then the brothers would most certainly make plans for a manned flight. They called the sheep Monteauciel, meaning “ascend to the sky.”
A great crowd gathered at the Royal Palace. All the chateau windows and the rooftops were crowded with onlookers. The balloon had been constructed hastily, in just four days’ time, when the intended paper balloon—a beautiful thing measuring seventy feet high by forty feet wide, with a background colored in azure and ornamented with gold in representation of the sun—was destroyed by rain. For this new balloon, the brothers had turned again to taffeta, that crisp, smooth silk fabric, and coated it with varnish against all weathers. It was not as big but equally stunning, a bright blue bulb ribboned by two golden bands.
These first flying balloons were not constructed with an onboard heat source; they were filled and then released. The brothers filled their balloon with Montgolfier gas, and at the signal, the dozen or so men holding it back on tethers all let go at once. “The machine rose majestically,” Étienne wrote to his wife, Adélaïde, “drawing after it a cage containing a sheep, a rooster, and a duck.” Then a gust of wind tilted the balloon at a sharp angle, spilling some of the hot air from the bottom now too steeply pointed up, but it soon righted itself again. It “continued on its way as majestically as ever for a distance of 1,800 fathoms [about two miles] where the wind tipped it over again so that it settled gently down on the earth” at the edge of the forest of Vaucresson. Upon inspection, the balloon had sustained some damage in the upper reaches of its curve, but the animals, Étienne reported, “were in fine shape, and the sheep had pissed in the cage.”
Shortly after this historic flight, the Montgolfier brothers constructed a balloon twice as big to raise a man into the sky. Certainly there was no hope that the balloon would reach space (which is, in fact, not possible for any balloon because at high altitude, the air becomes too thin to keep it inflated), but just to get the thing up and then safely down was an achievement beyond compare. The honor of becoming the world’s first pilot is most always granted to the twenty-six-year-old showboater François Pilatre de Rozier, who offered himself up as a test subject and made several flights in a Montgolfier balloon. But it is nearly certain that it was Étienne himself who was first, riding a balloon into the sky from the yard of Réveillon’s wallpaper factory attached to the ground by a tether.
A few years after the Mongolfiers, Claude Ruggieri, an Italian living in Paris, started messing around with rockets powered by gunpowder. He was one of many such curious people romanced by the flash and bang of explosions, and his name rose to prominence as early as 1806 when he began staging public demonstrations. He loaded his rockets with mice and rats and returned them to Earth under a parachute. His family had long been in the fireworks business, and launching small animals into the sky was a logical next step. By 1830 Ruggieri was building larger and larger rockets, and he announced that he would launch a ram into the sky from the Champ de Mars. Surely he knew about the Montgolfier brothers, and with this flight perhaps he would match them. The Eiffel Tower had not yet been constructed, but the location was no less dramatic. Pitched by the excitement of the spectacle, a young man volunteered himself in place of the ram. Ruggieri accepted. Moments before launch, the French police arrived to cancel the demonstration. As it turned out, the man was not a man at all but just a boy eleven years old.
While the Montgolfier balloon flight was the first with animals, it certainly was not the last. Balloon flights have persisted as a relatively inexpensive and efficient way to send animals, and so science, high into the atmosphere. In 1862 Britain’s famed meteorologist Sir James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell ascended to about 35,000 feet in a balloon they called Mars. They carried with them a cage full of pigeons and marked various altitudes by casting them over the side, one by one. Pigeons can fly up to about 6,000 feet altitude, but as the balloon got higher and higher, the birds became dopier and dopier until they could not fly at all. Now when the men released them, they fell leadenly away and out of sight. Glaisher passed out at about 28,800 feet, and Coxwell, in a hypoxic stupor, saved both of their lives by releasing air from the balloon, allowing them to descend to a lower altitude. It is not known what became of the pigeons.
Almost one hundred years later (1947–1960), the US Air Force experimented with high-altitude balloon flights carrying animal passengers out of Holloman Air Force Base, adjacent to the army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Holloman launched balloons carrying fruit flies, mice, rats, hamsters, guinea pigs, chickens, rabbits, cats, dogs, frogs, goldfish, monkeys, as well as fungi and various seeds. What happened to these animals at high altitude would happen to a human being, so the logic went. The resulting data was then used to develop life-support technologies that would allow humans to eventually endure the conditions up high.