NAVIGATING THE AIR 



To France, therefore, belongs the honor of inventing 

 the balloon and being first to test it with a human pas- 

 senger, On this last point, however, France only eclipsed 

 America by a few days. For while the craze for balloon- 

 making was at its height in France during the summer 

 of 1783, a somewhat similar craze on a small scale had 

 started in some of the American cities. Two members 

 of the Philosophical Academy of Philadelphia, Ritten- 

 house and Hopkins, constructed a peculiar balloon 

 having forty-seven small bags inflated with hydrogen 

 attached to a car. On November 28th, six weeks after 

 Rozier's ascent, this balloon was sent up, with James 

 Wilcox, a carpenter of Philadelphia, as passenger. 

 Everything was going well with the voyager until he 

 suddenly discovered that the wind was wafting him 

 toward the Schuylkill River, which so alarmed him that 

 in attempting to descend quickly he punctured the bags 

 so freely that he came to the ground with considerable 

 force, escaping, however, with a dislocated wrist. 



Meanwhile, in Europe, a new danger to balloonists 

 had arisen. Fanaticism was rife, particularly in the 

 vicinity ot Paris, and many members of the cloth were 

 tireless in denouncing this "tampering with God^s laws 

 by invading the inviolability of the firmament." For- 

 tunately, the king took a broader view, and his soldiers 

 were supplied freely for protecting balloonists and their 

 property; but even with this protection both were 

 roughly handled at times. 



By this time England had become aroused ; balloon- 

 making became popular across the Channel, and some 

 new records for time and distance were soon made. 



[237] 



