448 
AEROSTATIOTSr. 
pany, and consists of a warden, four masters, thirty assistant's, and 
one hundred and forty men on the livery, besides the commonalty. 
The French had formerly a great baker, called grand panetier de 
France, who had the superintendence of all the bakers of Paris. Since 
the beginning of this century, they were first under the jnrisdiction 
of the lieutenant-general de police. In some provinces the lord was 
the only baker in his seigneury, and kept a public oven, to which all 
the tenants were obliged to bring their bread ! This right was called 
furmagium, or furmaticum, though, it rather merited the title of furtura, 
and made part of the bannalite. 
Aerostation. 
In the modern application of the term, aerostation signifies the art 
of navigating through the air, both in its principles and practice. 
Hence also the machines which are employed for this purpose are 
called aerostats, or aerostatic machines ; and, on account of their 
round figure, air-balloons. In 1729 Bartholomew Grisman, a Jesuit - 
of Lisbon, caused an aerostatic machine, in the form of a bird, to. be 
constructed ; and made it to ascend by means of a fire kindled under 
it, in the presence of the king, queen, and a great concourse of specta- 
tors. Unfortunately, in rising, it struck against a cornice, was torn, 
and fell to the ground. The inventor proposed renewing his experi- 
ment ; but the people had denounced him to the inquisition as a sor- 
cerer, and he withdrew into Spain, where he died in a hospital. In 1706 
the honourable Henry Cavendish discovered that inflammable air, 
{hydrogen gas) was at least seven times as light as the common air. 
It soon afterwards occurred to the celebrated Dr. Black, that if a thin 
bag were filled with this gaseous substance, it would, according to 
the established laws of specific gravity, rise in the common atmo- 
sphere ; but he did not pursue the inquiry. The same idea was next 
conceived by Mr. Cavallo, to whom is generally ascribed the honour 
of commencing the experiments on this subject. He had made but 
little progress, however, in these experiments, when the discovery of 
Stephen and John Montgolfier, paper-manufacturers of France, was 
announced in 1782, and engaged the attention of the philosophical 
world. Observing the natural ascent of smoke and clouds in the at- 
mosphere, these artists were led to suppose that heated air, if enclosed 
in a suitable covering, would prove buoyant. Accordingly, after 
several smaller experiments, by which this idea was fully confirmed, 
they inflated a large balloon with rarefied air, on June 5, 1783, which 
immediately and rapidly rose to the height of six thousand feet, and 
answ'ered their most sanguine expectations. 
Mr. Montgolfier repeated an experiment with a machine of his 
construction, before the commissaries of the Academy of Sciences, on 
the eleventh and twelfth of September. This machine was forty-seven 
feet high, and about forty-three feet in diameter. When distended, it 
appeared spheroidical. It was made of canvass, covered with paper 
both within and without, and it weighed one thousand pounds. The 
operation of filling it with rarefied air, produced by means of the com- 
bustion of fifty pounds of dry straw and twelve pounds of chopped 
