ned that this experiment aroused enormous interest in
Paris, whence the news rapidly spread over all France and to Britain.
A Parisian scientific society invited Stephen Montgolfier to Paris in
order that the citizens of the metropolis should have their imaginations
excited by seeing the hero of these remarkable experiments. Montgolfier
was not a rich man, and to enable him to continue his experiments the
society granted him a considerable sum of money. He was then enabled to
construct a very fine balloon, elaborately decorated and painted, which
ascended at Versailles in the presence of the Court.

To add to the value of this experiment three animals were sent up in a
basket attached to the balloon. These were a sheep, a cock, and a duck.
All sorts of guesses were made as to what would be the fate of the "poor
creatures". Some people imagined that there was little or no air in
those higher regions and that the animals would choke; others said they
would be frozen to death. But when the balloon descended the cock was
seen to be strutting about in his usual dignified way, the sheep was
chewing the cud, and the duck was quacking for water and worms.

At this point we will leave the work of the brothers Montgolfier. They
had succeeded in firing the imagination of nearly every Frenchman, from
King Louis down to his humblest subject. Strange, was it not, though
scores of millions of people had seen smoke rise, and clouds float, for
untold centuries, yet no one, until the close of the eighteenth century,
thought of making a balloon?

The learned Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, who lived in the thirteenth
century, seems to have thought of the possibility of producing a
contrivance that would float in air. His idea was that the earth's
atmosphere was a "true fluid", and that it had an upper surface as the
ocean has. He quite believed that on this upper surface--subject, in his
belief, to waves similar to those of the sea--an air-ship might float if
it once succeeded in rising to the required height. But the difficulty
was to reach the surface of this aerial sea. To do this he proposed to
make a large hollow globe of metal, wrought as thin as the skill of man
could make it, so that it might be as light as possible, and this vast
globe was to be filled with "liquid fire". Just what "liquid fire" was,
one cannot attempt to explain, and it is doubtful if Bacon himself
had any clear idea. But he doubtless thought of some gaseous sub