450 
AEROSTATION. 
The balloon having been hauled down, M. Girande de Villietle 
placed himself in the gallery opposite to M. Rozier, and being suf- 
fered to ascend, it hovered for nine minutes over Paris, in the sight of all 
its inhabitants, at the height of about three hundred and thirty feet. 
In another experiment, the Marquis d’Arlandes ascended with 
M. Rozier much in the same manner. In consequence of the report of 
the preceding experiment, signed by the commissaries of the Academy 
of Sciences, it was ordered that the annual pension of six hundred 
livres should be given to Messrs. Montgolfier for the year 1783. In 
the experiments above recited, the machine was secured by ropes ; 
but they w'ere soon succeeded by unconfined aerial navigation. 
Accordingly, the balloon of seventy-four feet in height, above 
mentioned, was removed to a royal palace in the Bois de Bou- 
logne, and all things being ready, on the twenty-first of Decem- 
ber, M. Pilatier de Rozier and the Marquis de Arlandes took their 
respective posts in the car, and at fifty-four minutes after one the 
machine was absolutely abandoned to the element, and ascended 
calmly and majestically in the atmosphere. The aeronants having 
reached the height of about two hundred and eighty feet, waved 
their hats to the astonished multitude ; but they soon rose too high to 
be distinguished, and were thought to have soared to an elevation of 
about three thousand feet. They were at first driven by a north-west 
wind horizontally over the river Seine and over Paris, taking care to 
clear the steeples and high buildings by increasing the fire, and m 
rising met with a current of air, which carried them southward. 
Having passed the Boulevard, and desisting from supplying the fire 
with fuel, they descended very gently in a field beyond the New 
Boulevard, about nine thousand yards distant from the palace, hav- 
ing been in the air twenty-five minutes. The weight of the whole ap- 
paratus, including that of the two travellers, was between sixteen 
hundred and seventeen hundred pounds. 
Notwithstanding the rapid progress of aerostation in France, we 
have no account of any aerostatic experiments having been performed 
in other countries till about the close of the year 1783. The first 
experiment of this kind publicly exhibited in our own country was 
performed in London on the twenty-fifth of November by count Zam- 
beccari, an ingenious Italian, with a balloon of oiled silk, ten feet in 
diameter, and weighing eleven pounds. It was gilt in order to render 
it more beautiful, and more impermeable to the gas. This balloon, 
three-fourths of which were filled with inflammable air, was launched 
' from the Artillery Ground in the presence of a vast concourse of spec- 
tators, at one o’clock in the afternoon, and at half past three was 
taken up near Petworth in Sussex, forty-eight miles distant from Lon- 
don ; so that it travelled at the rate of nearly twenty miles an hour. Its 
descent was occasioned by a rent, which must have been the effect of 
the rarefaction of the inflammable air, when the balloon ascended to 
the lighter parts of the atmosphere. 
Aerostatic experiments and aerial voyages became so frequent in 
the course of the year 1784, that the limits of this article will not 
allow our particularly recording them. We shall, therefore, merely 
mention those which were attended with any peculiar circumstances. 
