These ingenious persons
carried it within doors, and having wished to fully inflate
it--half the gas having by this time escaped--they applied a pair
of bellows to its mouth. By this means they only forced out the
volume of the hydrogen gas that was left; and this gas, coming in
contact with a candle that had been placed too near, exploded.
The report was louder than that of a cannon, and so powerful was
the shock that the men were thrown down, the glass blown out of
the windows, and the house otherwise damaged. The men suffered
severely, their hair, beards, and eyebrows being completely burnt
away, and their faces severely scorched.
At Grenoble, in Dauphine, De Baron let off a balloon on the 13th
of January, 1784. It rose, and at first took a northern
direction; but, having encountered a current of air, it was
carried away in a south-easterly direction, and after flying a
distance of three-quarters of a mile, it fell, having traversed
this distance in fifteen minutes.
A society, under the presidency of the Abbe de Mably, having
constructed a balloon thirty-seven feet high and twenty feet in
diameter, sent it off from the court of the Castle of Pisancon,
near Romano, on the same day, the 13th of February.
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