It was a November night of the year 1782, in the little town of
Annonay, near Lyons. Two young men, Stephen and Joseph
Montgolfier, the representatives of a firm of paper makers,
were sitting together over their parlour fire. While watching
the smoke curling up the chimney one propounded an idea by way
of a sudden inspiration: "Why shouldn't smoke be made to raise
bodies into the air?"

The world was waiting for this utterance, which, it would seem,
was on the tip of the tongue with many others. Cavendish had
already discovered what he designated "inflammable air," though
no one had as yet given it its later title of hydrogen gas.
Moreover, in treating of this gas--Dr. Black of Edinburgh, as
much as fifteen years before the date we have now arrived at,
had suggested that it should be made capable of raising a thin
bladder in the air. With a shade more of good fortune, or
maybe with a modicum more of leisure, the learned Doctor would
have won the invention of the balloon for his own country.
Cavallo came almost nearer, and actually putting the same idea
into practice, had succeeded in the spring of 1782 in making
soap bubbles blown with hydrogen gas float upwards. But he had
accomplished no more when, as related, in the autumn of the
same year the brothers Montgolfier conceived the notion of
making bodies "levitate" by the simpler expedient of filling
them with smoke.

This was the crude idea, the application of which in their
hands was soon marked with notable success. Their own trade
supplied ready and suitable materials for a first experiment,
and, making an oblong bag of thin paper a few feet in length,