(Montgolfier's Balloon Annonay, 5th of June of 1783.)
We are accustomed to rank the brothers Joseph and Etienne
Montgolfier as equally distinguished in the field of science.
The reason for thus associating these two names seems to have
been the fraternal friendship which subsisted in an extraordinary
degree in the Montgolfier family, rather than any equality of
claim which they had to the notice of posterity. After special
investigation, we find that Joseph Montgolfier was very superior
to his brother, and that it is to him principally, if not
exclusively, that we owe the invention of aerostation.
Nevertheless, we shall not insist upon this fact; and seeing that
a sacred amity always cemented a perfect union in the Montgolfier
family, we will regard that union as unbroken in any sense, and
will not insinuate that the brother of Montgolfier was
undeserving of the honoured rank which in his lifetime he held.
In 1783, the sons of Pierre Montgolfier, a rich papermaker at
Annonay department of Ardeche, were already in the prime of life,
and it is related of them that their principal occupation was
experimenting in the physical sciences. Joseph Montgolfier,
after being convinced by a number of minor experiments made in
1782 and 1783, that a heat of 180 degrees rarefied the air and
made it occupy a space of TWICE the extent it occupied before
being heated--or, in other words, that this degree of heat
diminished the weight of air by one half--began to speculate on
what might be the shape and the material of a structure which
being filled with air thus heated, would be able to raise itself
from the earth in spite of the weight of its own covering.
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