a balloon in Great Britain, but he certainly was not. A
very poor man, named James Tytler, who then lived in Edinburgh,
supporting himself and family in the humblest style of garret or cottage
life by the exercise of his pen, had this honour. He had effected an
ascent at Edinburgh on the 27th of August 1784, just nineteen days
previous to Lunardi. Tytler's ascent, however, was almost a failure, by
his employing the dangerous and unmanageable Montgolfier principle.
After several ineffectual attempts, Tytler, finding that he could not
carry up his fire-stove with him, determined, in the maddening
desperation of disappointment, to go without this his sole sustaining
power. Jumping into his car, which was no other than a common crate
used for packing earthenware, he and the balloon ascended from Comely
Garden, and immediately afterwards fell in the Restalrig Road. For a
wonder, Tytler was uninjured; and though he did not reach a greater
altitude than 300 feet, nor traverse a greater distance than half a
mile, yet his name must ever be mentioned as that of the first Briton
who ascended with a balloon, and the first man who ascended in Britain.

"Tytler was the son of a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, and had
been educated as a surgeon; but being of an eccentric and erratic
genius, he adopted literature as a profession, and was the principal
editor of the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. Becoming
embroiled in politics, he published a handbill of a seditious tendency,
and consequently was compelled to seek a refuge in America, where he
died in 1805, after conducting a newspaper at Salem, in New England, for
several years."

The voyage of Vincenzo Lunardi was made in September 1784. His letters
to a friend, in which he comments on the manners and customs of the
English, are very amusing. His balloon was of the ordinary spherical
shape, made of the best oiled silk, about 520 yards of which were used
in its construction. It was filled with hydrogen gas, and provided with
car, oars, and wings. The car consisted simply of a wooden platform
surrounded by a breast high railing, and the oars and wings were
intended, the one to check, by a vertical motion, the rapidity of
descent, and the other to act as sails when becalmed in the upper
regions of cloudland. He requested permission to make Chelsea Hospital
the scene of his first aerial exploit, and the Governor, Sir George
Howard, with the full approval