Aerostation

The art of hot-air ballooning

By 6 A.M. carriages blocked the road from Paris to Versailles, where a fire raged in the château's courtyard one September morning in 1783. Black smoke funneled into a heaving aerostatic machine, the bulk of it painted blue with gold curlicues. The hot-air balloon, as it is now known, was slowly swelling and coming to life.

King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette stood by. People crowded the streets watching the sky. Spectators climbed onto nearby rooftops and filled every window of the château, as attendants placed a trio of passengers into the balloon's basket-a duck, a sheep, and a rooster, history's first aeronauts. Up they went, drifting for eight minutes before sinking into the woods, where a recovery crew on horseback raced to find them. Dazed, but otherwise unharmed, the pilgrims were presented to the king, who was so pleased he promptly ordered the creatures cooked for his dinner.

The balloon, invented by the enterprising French brothers Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740-1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745-1799), was inspired, Joseph claimed, by seeing Madame Montgolfier's chemise fluttering as it dried near the fire. A month after the first flight, it was the first contraption to ferry humans into the "aerian ocean," when the twenty-six-year-old daredevil Pilâtre de Rozier (1754-1785) rose to a height of eighty feet in a Montgolfier balloon held in place by ropes.

Still, no one had flown untethered. The king had decreed that only a condemned inmate could fly freely, in exchange for a pardon. But, working his connections at court, de Rozier convinced King Louis that aerostation was safe, and Louis watched fr...