d rose to the
height of 6000 feet. After a voyage of an hour and three-quarters, they
descended at Nesle, a distance of 27 miles from the place of their
departure. On their descent, M. Roberts having left the car, which
lightened the vessel about 130 pounds, M. Charles reascended, and in
twenty minutes mounted with great rapidity to the height of 9000 feet.
When he left the earth, the thermometer stood at 47 degrees, but, in the
space of ten minutes, it fell 21 degrees. On making this great and
sudden transition into an atmosphere so intensely cold, he felt as if
his blood had been freezing, and experienced a severe pain in the right
ear and jaw. He passed through different currents of air, and, in the
higher regions, the expansion of the gas was so great, that the balloon
must have burst, had he not speedily opened the valve, and allowed part
of the gas to escape. After having risen to the height of 10,500 feet,
he descended, about three miles from the place where M. Roberts stepped
out of the car.

Jean Pierre Blanchard, a Frenchman, who had long exerted his ingenuity,
but with little success, in attempting to perfect a mechanical
contrivance by which he might be enabled to fly, was the next to prepare
a balloon upon the hydrogen-gas principle. It was 27 feet in diameter.
He ascended from Paris, March 2d, 1784, accompanied by a Benedictine
friar. After rising to the height of 15 feet, the balloon was
precipitated to the ground with a violent shock, which so frightened the
friar, that he would not again leave _terra firma_. M. Blanchard
re-ascended alone, and, in his ascent, he passed through various
currents of air, as aeronauts generally do. He rose to the height of
9600 feet, where he suffered from extreme cold, and was oppressed with
drowsiness. As a means of directing his course, he had attached to the
car an apparatus consisting of a rudder and two wings, but found that
they had little or no controlling power over the balloon. He continued
his voyage for an hour and a quarter, when he descended in safety.

During the course of the year subsequent to the Montgolfiers' discovery,
several experiments on the ascending power of balloons had been made in
England; but the first person who there ventured on an aerial voyage was
Vincent Lunardi, an Italian, who ascended from London, September 21,
1784. In the succeeding year, he gratified the inhabitants of Glasgow
and Edinburgh with the spectacle of an aerial excursion,