A sheep, a duck and a rooster flew before any human balloonist
Before anyone dared ride a hot air balloon, the Montgolfier brothers sent up a sheep named Montauciel, meaning Climb-to-the-sky, with a duck and a rooster, in front of Louis XVI at Versailles. All three landed safely. Within weeks people followed, and the paper makers from Annonay had launched human flight.
Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne were the 12th and 15th of 16 children in a paper-making family. Joseph was a dreamer who built parachutes and once jumped from the family house; Etienne trained as an architect and took over the mills after his eldest brother died in 1772. Joseph's ballooning idea came while he watched a fire in 1782, musing over the unbreakable fortress of Gibraltar and whether troops might be lifted by whatever carried embers upward. He wrongly believed smoke contained a special buoyant gas.
His first model, a thin wooden box covered with taffeta, shot up to the ceiling when he lit paper beneath it. The brothers then built one three times larger, which on 14 December 1782 escaped their control and drifted nearly three kilometres. On 4 June 1783 a sackcloth-and-paper globe, held together by 1,800 buttons, rose before dignitaries at Annonay and stayed up about ten minutes.
Etienne took the show to Paris and teamed up with the wallpaper maker Jean-Baptiste Reveillon, who decorated the envelopes in sky blue and gold. The king had proposed launching two condemned criminals, but the animals went instead on 19 September 1783, flying about eight minutes. The sheep stood in for human physiology, while the birds served as controls.
Etienne himself made a tethered ascent, probably on 15 October 1783, and on 21 November Pilatre de Rozier and the marquis d'Arlandes made the first free flight, crossing about nine kilometres of Paris in 25 minutes while dabbing out scorch marks with sponges. The craze put balloons on fans and furniture, and the king ennobled the brothers' father. Joseph later invented a self-acting hydraulic ram pump in 1796. Etienne died in 1799, Joseph in 1810, and their company survives as Canson, selling art paper in 150 countries.
Source: Montgolfier brothers
