into the air. They got this idea from watching the smoke curling up
the chimney from the heat of the fire beneath.

In 1783 they constructed the first successful balloon of which we have
any description. It was in the form of a round ball, 110 feet in
circumference and, with the frame weighed 300 pounds. It was filled
with 22,000 cubic feet of vapor. It rose to a height of 6,000 feet and
proceeded almost 7,000 feet, when it gently descended. France went
wild over the exhibition.

The first to risk their lives in the air were M. Pilatre de Rozier and
the Marquis de Arlandes, who ascended over Paris in a hot-air balloon
in November, 1783. They rose five hundred feet and traveled a distance
of five miles in twenty-five minutes.

In the following December Messrs. Charles and Robert, also Frenchmen,
ascended ten thousand feet and traveled twenty-seven miles in two
hours.

The first balloon ascension in Great Britain was made by an experimenter
named Tytler in 1784. A few months later Lunardi sailed over London.

In 1836 three Englishmen, Green, Mason and Holland, went from London to
Germany, five hundred miles, in eighteen hours.

The greatest balloon exhibition up to then, indeed the greatest ever,
as it has never been surpassed, was given by Glaisher and Coxwell, two
Englishmen, near Wolverhampton, on September 5, 1862. They ascended
to such an elevation that both lost the power of their limbs, and had
not Coxwell opened the descending valve with his teeth, they would