Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles was a young physicist who started out with little or no idea about what the Montgolfiers were using to send their inventions skyward. He only knew that they were employing some sort of gas in airtight bags. He had knowledge of the experiments of British scientist Henry Cavendish, who in 1766 discovered a method for producing and trapping hydrogen efficiently. With his assistants, Charles spent three days processing five hundred pounds of sulfuric acid with a thousand pounds of iron to fill a twelve-foot diameter, rubber-impregnated silk balloon with the gas.

On August 27, 1783, fifty thousand cheering Parisians watched Charles’ invention rise to three thousand feet and disappear into the haze. It landed fifteen miles away in the village of Gonesse. Peasants and farmers, well out of the loop on contemporary events, approached it with dread. Writing eighty years later. British historian Hatton Turner described the melee:

…on first sight it is supposed by many to to have come from another world; many fly; others, more sensible, think it is a monstrous bird. After it has alighted, there is yet some motion in it from the gas it still contains. A small crowd gains courage from numbers, and for an hour approaches by gradual steps, hoping meanwhile the monster will take flight. At length one bolder than the rest takes his gun, stalks carefully to within shot, fires, witnesses the monster shrink, gives a shout of triumph, and the crowd rushes in with flails and pitchforks. One tears what he thinks to be the skin, and causes a poisonous stench; again all retire. Shame, no doubt, now urges them on, and they tie the cause of alarm to a horse’s tail, who gallops across the country, tearing it to shreds.

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