The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation 1783-1784: With a Word on the Importance of Ballooning for the Science of Heat and the Art of Building Railroads

by Charles Coulston Gillispie

Overview

This vividly illustrated book introduces the reader to the brothers Montgolfier, who launched the first hotair balloon in Annonay, France on 4 June 1783.

Originally published in 1983.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691641157
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #684
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783-1784

With a Word on the Importance of Ballooning for the Science of Heat and the Art of Building Railroads

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By Charles Coulston Gillispie

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08321-6

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CHAPTER 1

1. To Fix the Date

On Wednesday, 4 June 1783, rain marred the day in Annonay, a small city in the northern tip of the region called the Vivarais. Even so, people began gathering late in the morning in the Place des Cordeliers, the lower square from which a single-arched bridge traversed the river Deûme, a swift little stream that rushes into the slightly larger and slower Cance a short way further down (Fig. 1). In the middle of the square a pair of brothers directed four husky laborers in the construction of a wooden scaffold. Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, forty-three and thirty-eight years old respectively, were dressed in the fashion of the prosperous provincial bourgeoisie, Joseph carelessly, Etienne neatly. Their men set up two masts stayed with cords, one on either side of the platform, both fitted with a pulley inside at the top. Two detachable ropes, one running over each wheel, were fastened to an eye sewn onto the center of a pile of fabric collapsed on the platform. Drawing on the cords, the workmen hauled the mass into position so that it hung shapelessly between the poles, an enormous bag of sackcloth lined with three thin layers of paper, though the spectators could not see that.

The spectators could see that the bottom gaped open. Stretched on a frame of scantling, the mouth was eight feet square. Under it the brothers slid a brazier in which they had kindled a fire of shredded wool and dry straw, started with the aid of alcohol. They had awaited the emergence from an official doorway of some two dozen witnesses whose presence in Annonay was the reason for proceeding in the face of inclement weather. The diocesan assembly — Etats particuliers — of the Vivarais was in the next-to-last day of its annual week-long session. Interest among the deputies and other observers rose with the swelling of the great balloon from limpness into form. Like a live thing it began bucking and tugging at the ropes as it filled with hot air. The quartet of peasants reined down with all their weight. Etienne ordered them to let go, and the great globe leaped almost straight up to a height of 3,000 feet (500 toises), whereupon air currents carried it a good half-league (over a mile and a half), before it settled to earth, lighting on a rough stone fence between sections of a vineyard. At the last moment the brothers had decided to suspend the brazier below the mouth of the balloon in order to counter the cooling of the rain. After landing, the iron basket tipped over and spilled embers onto the fabric, setting it afire. Country folk working among the vines were too frightened to put out the flames, and in a few minutes the great envelope was consumed.

No eyewitness said whether this progenitor of all balloons was decorated with the gaiety that has enhanced the appeal of its descendants, but we do know its physical characteristics from a letter written by a brother of the inventors, the abbé Alexandre-Charles Montgolfier. It weighed 500 pounds. It was slightly elongated with a lateral diameter of thirty-five feet and a displacement near 28,000 cubic feet. The bag was pieced together out of four fitted segments, consisting of a dome and three lateral bands, the middle being the longest, all fastened by 1,800 buttons sewn in three rings along the upper edge and one end of each band. The assembly was reinforced vertically by a kind of fishnet of strong cords covering the outside surface (Fig. 2). Loss of hot air through the buttonholes was the main reason for the limitation of flight time to about ten minutes. The next day Joseph and Etienne petitioned their lordships of the Estates to record a formal approbation of the experiment, and thus to establish their priority — "donner une datte certaine" — in this first public trial of flight (Fig. 3). For their "machine diostatique" had performed according to the theory that had guided them in its construction; they meant to improve the design and make it useful; they feared lest others benefit from their discovery and appropriate the glory. The deputies obliged on 5 June and adjourned.

The body whose minutes officially recorded the start of the age of flight was itself something of an anomaly. First convoked in 1381, the Estates of the Vivarais were unique among comparable assemblies of the French monarchy in representing only two orders, the nobility and the third estate. The bishop of Viviers sat only as baron of Largentière, and the clergy sent no deputies. The Vivarais combined a local identity going back to the Helvii of Roman Gaul with a transitional geography. Part of Languedoc, its territory constituted a wedge of that great province pressing north along the west bank of the Rhône into the mass of central France. Annonay was and remains a market town and an industrial town in the commercial and cultural orbit of Lyons. A mere 120 kilometers to the south, Aubenas belongs to the Midi, as do the riverside communities below Viviers. On the west the low granitic ranges that divide the region from the upper Loire hint of proximity to Auvergne. Give or take a dozen-odd communes along the southern and western fringes, the Ardèche of today (named in the Revolution for the river that flows from the Cévennes by Aubenas into the Rhône) virtually coincides with the Vivarais of old. The modem department thus has the distinction of more nearly corresponding to an ancient province than does any other.

Among the privileges of the local assembly was that of sending deputies to the Estates of Languedoc sitting in Montpellier, by far the most vital and enterprising of the representative institutions that had survived from the Middle Ages in peripheral regions of France. The Estates of Vivarais apportioned the taxes levied by the Estates of Languedoc and had oversight of diocesan civil funds, of public works, and of police and public order. They acted as a combined chamber of commerce and agricultural society and expended small sums in promoting economic initiatives on the part of farmers, tradesmen, and manufacturers.

Local worthies rather than august personages made up the membership. The nobility was represented by thirteen barons, among ten of whom (three did not have the right) rotated the annual duty of sitting for their order in the Estates of Languedoc. The nobleman whose year it was would come on to preside over the Estates of Vivarais. Those sessions alternated between Annonay, Viviers, and Aubenas, always in the week following adjournment in Montpellier. Except for the presiding baron de tour, the great lords who held these fiefs — the due de Bourbon for Annonay, the bishop of Viviers, the comte de Vogüé, the baron de Montlaur, etc. — rarely appeared in person. Their place was normally taken by a bailiff, usually a member of the judicial nobility.

As for the third estate, thirteen cities had the right of representation in the Estates of Vivarais, and eight of them rotated in sitting for the diocese in Montpellier. In the intervals of the formal sessions, the powers of the Estates were exercised by three commissioners, a delegate of the Estates of Languedoc, a royal judge, and the consul of Viviers. Finally, a syndic or administrator, a clerk-of-court, a tax collector, and several inspectors comprised the local bureaucracy. In form, they were named annually by the Estates. In fact, these offices had become virtually hereditary in certain families of notables, people of the level of the Montgolfiers, who were leaders in the paper industry.

An unlikelier setting than Annonay for the birth of aviation would be hard to imagine. The north bank of the Cance is precipitous where the small river skirts the town, and the Deûme pours into it through a deep, narrow cleft in the last kilometer of its independent course after flowing through a hilly countryside. Much of Annonay was built into the shelter of these declivities. The main road from Le Puy followed the Cance and that from Saint-Etienne the Deûme. They joined above the Place des Cordeliers, and the combined route there came together with the highway to Lyons. Around about the time of the trial of the balloon, the population consisted of 7,000 to 8,000 inhabitants (today it is about 22,000).

Etienne Montgolfier left a brief sketch of the local economy. At a weekly market people of the mountains to the west exchanged commodities with agricultural producers from the plains of Dauphiny and the banks of the Rhône. The immediate countryside yielded wine and beans, the latter of high quality and much in demand in Provence and Languedoc. Silkworms flourished. A few enterprising cultivators were succeeding with the delicate, temperamental white variety. Tawing leather for the luxury trade in gloves, tanning skins, shearing sheep, preparing and dyeing woolens, a new ribbon factory — all that along with paper, the most important industry by far, made up the manufacturing sector.

2. The Paper Industry

In the 1780s four paper mills were dotted along the Deûme in locations that are still the sites of modem factories: at Faya on the edge of town; at Marmaty upstream a little; and finally at Vidalon-le-bas and Vidalon-le-haut, both deep in the ravine of the parish of Davézieux. The Deûme has a steep pitch and turned the mill wheels strongly except during a few months in summer. Its water is clear and soft, good for washing the rags and holding the pulp in a clean suspension. Annonay had ready access to the markets of Orléans and Paris by way of Saint-Etienne and the Loire and even more so to Marseilles and abroad by the Rhône. The Saône and upper Rhône made the supply of raw material convenient, since the best rags came from Burgundy. The climate was dry and mild enough for sizing paper the year around. Marmaty and Faya belonged to the Johannots and the two Vidalon mills to the Montgolfiers.

The rival families were much alike except in being respectively Protestant and Catholic. In one respect Annonay was thoroughly Languedocian. The city had been grievously split in the religious wars of the 16th century. Early in the 20th century, properly brought up Catholic children were still not allowed to make friends with the offspring of Protestants. Thus divided, and in fierce competition commercially, the Johannots and the Montgolfiers nevertheless had common interests in improving the conditions for trade and manufacturing in the region, in the maintenance of discipline among the labor force, and in the state of the art of making paper. Of the two firms, the Montgolfiers were somewhat better known throughout the industry.

Family tradition has it that the Montgolfiers were already papermakers in the 14th century, when they migrated from Bavaria to Auvergne, settling in Ambert. Their ancestors are said to have brought the art from Damascus to Frankenthal on returning from the Second Crusade in the mid-12th century. It may have been so. There is, at any rate, little doubt that, after many vicissitudes, including several generations in which the Montgolfiers were Protestant and a further migration to Beaujeu in Beaujolais, two sons of Jean Montgolfier, Michel and Raymond, born in 1669 and 1673, came to Annonay as suitors for the hands of two daughters of Antoine Chelles, proprietor of the paper mill at Vidalon and one of their father's associates in business. Michel, an artist, chose the prettier sister; Raymond, an artisan, preferred the sturdier. The brothers gave the bridal pair gowns they had stopped in Lyons to buy, and the two couples were married in a joint ceremony on 14 January 1693. Michel's lovely Françoise died soon after giving birth. Antoine Chelles's own sons proved feckless, and their father turned to his capable son-in-law. Thus Raymond, twenty at the time of the double marriage, came into control of the mill, and through his wife's inheritance Vidalon became home to the Montgolfiers.

Raymond Montgolfier and his wife, the robust Marguerite, had nineteen children. The fifth, and the oldest boy to survive infancy, Pierre, was bom with the century in 1700 (Plate I). In 1727, he married Anne Duret. In eighteen years, she gave birth to sixteen children, the twelfth and fifteenth, Joseph and Etienne, being our inventors of aviation (Plate II). Their grandfather, Raymond, died in 1743. He had built up the mill from artisanal to industrial dimensions, forming his heir, Pierre, in the business and confiding the companion mill, Vidalon-le-bas, to his second son, Antoine. Raymond was employing over one hundred laborers by 1735, when he petitioned the archbishop of Vienne to allow consecration of a chapel on the property so that his dependents might have the consolations of religion without leaving the premises, even on Sundays. For discipline extended from the work to the lives and morals of the employees, man, woman, and child, most of whom were lodged and fed as part of their livelihood.

Vidalon was home and workplace, nursery and church, to the working families and to the ruling family. A formal set of "Rules to be observed in the Montgolfier paper factory at Annonay" opens with this preamble:

Since the Master cares for the workers as if they were his children, it is only just that for their part those who work in his household should watch over his interests and should live in peace and harmony with one another. Since, further, there may be some among their number who out of weakness would allow harm to be done the Master, and others who may neglect his interests, it is also just that the guilty should incur the penalties and not the innocent.

And the document goes into detail on the use to be made of the tools, on the accommodations, on the sanitary facilities, on the arrangements for board and lodging, and on the precise fines to be paid for infractions of every sort. Parents were responsible for the conduct of their offspring, who were brought up in the factory and put to work at an early age. If through "ill-controlled tenderness," the children were allowed to have their way, fathers and mothers were responsible for the damage.

A visitor to the Ardèche today is at first astonished at the size of the compounds that once housed the rural population. Too rude ever to have been dwellings of nobility, they may contain seventy or eighty rooms. Such originally was the "mas" of Vidalon, deep down on the floor of the narrow valley of the Deûme. Many years later, Adélaïde de Montgolfier, a daughter of Etienne and a minor writer in the 1840s, recalled the factory of her childhood, which had been constructed shop by shop in a series of additions to this ancient farmhouse. With the ear of memory she could still hear the thundering of the mill wheels and stamping mill; the splashing of the torrent on the oaken blades; the groaning of gigantic joists and axletrees; the sighing of the breeze in the drying racks; the peremptory whistles of the foreman in the shop where the new Dutch cylinders were making pulp; the patois of the workers; the nursery songs of women and children cutting and sorting rags. All that mingled in her recollection with the sound of the wind in the willows and poplars and the singing of nightingales upstream and down.

To the passerby on the highway above, however, Vidalon seemed a deserted structure. Not a human figure was in view, for the laborers were shut up inside all week long and crossed the courtyard only twice a day on their way to the refectory. Nothing could be seen of this hive humming with industry but the tiles of the roof, the masonry of the outside walls (in a virtually perpendicular perspective), the gray blue granite of the cliff face opposite, and the kitchen garden adjoining the northern facade of the original house. Its careful cultivation was the only outward sign of life.

In that upper portion of the complex the Montgolfiers resided. The family historian uses the Fourierist word "phalanstery," half-seriously. In families of this size, only a few of the children could earn their keep through management of the business. Unmarried daughters were expected to enter religious orders, and younger sons to branch off commercially or to become priests. Of Pierre's juniors, Augustin was a Carthusian under the name of Dom Thomas in the entourage of the archbishop of Toulouse; Etienne was a Sulpician priest in Montréal, a sweet and gentle man who even spoke well of British rule after 1763; and Jacques was a financier in Paris, married, childless, and the source of avuncular aid and comfort to many a nephew passing through the capital.

Not everyone thus made a place for himself in the cloister or the world. The successive heads of the family in the three generations of the 18th century — Raymond, his son Pierre, and finally Etienne — each combined an austere ethic of work and duty for himself with a sense of responsibility for less virtuous or fortunate dependents. No relations were ever turned away from Vidalon. The artistic and ne'er-do-well Uncle Michel, who married again twice; the idling Chelles brothers-in-law, their wives and children; widowed aunts; discouraged nuns; canons without a living; dejected cousins — a place was found for everyone, no matter how cavalierly some had eaten up their share of the substance that gave them all a start in life. An older sister of Joseph and Etienne, Marianne, born in 1733, remembered all these kin, who together with her brothers and sisters must have brought the number in the household to forty or fifty.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783-1784 by Charles Coulston Gillispie. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• A Note on Units, pg. xi
• Chapter I, pg. 1
• Chapter II, pg. 25
• Chapter III, pg. 67
• Chapter IV, pg. 95
• Chapter V, pg. 138
• Sources and Bibliography, pg. 178
• Genealogical Chart, pg. 180
• Notes, pg. 181
• List of Illustrations, pg. 198
• Index, pg. 201