Rensselaer Union, Volume 3, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 July 1871 — Ballooning. [ARTICLE]

Ballooning.

For a long time the most "famous ascent in ueioxlulic annals, was that ot (lay I,usssc, who, ip September, 1804, started from Paris and reached tbA height of twentythree thousand feet. To lighten ttyc had Mm he threw overboard every article he could possibly dispense with; a common deal chair went with the rest, and fell into a hedge cloae to a girl who was tending some sheep As the sky at the time was clear, and tho balloon invisible, some of the country-folk held that if must have come straight from Para . isc, and cried ‘‘A miracle!” others refused to think that ” the workmen up above there could be such muffs," for the chair was roughly made; but tlic miracle mongers would, no doubt, have carried the question had not a timely account of Luasac’s voyage ap P' an din the papers. Several years later, Audrcoli and Brioschi ascended, it is said, but it has never been fully b lieved, to an elevation of thirty thousand feet, when the balloon burst with a loud report, and eame to the ground with great speed, but safity near Petrarch’s tomb The torn balloon must have acted as a parachute. . Mr Glalsher has himself falhn, .in his balloon, two miles in four minutes, and lias landed without being greatly hurt. He and Mr. Coxwell became the champion aeronauts after thi ir memorable ascent from Wolverhampton on the sth of September, 1802. They rose to the enormous height of thirty-seven thousand feet, a mile higher than the highest peak of the Himalayas; at twentynine thousand feet Mr. Glaishcr became insensible ; the valve line‘was entangled, and Mr. Coxwell had to climb from the car into the ring to readjust it; the cold wus so intense that he lost the use of his hands and had to pull it with his teeth Green, .whose death we lately announced, was in his time the very prince of acroHSuls, and made some fourteen hundred excursions into the air; but he was not much of a scientific observer, having (as. he told M. de Fouvlelle, who visited the old man in his latter days at Aerial Cottage, Holloway.,) “to make his bread by. it.’’ i. by mounting into the clouds for the delectation of those who resort to teagardens. A balloon is poised in the air with exquisite delicacy.- Tissancier relates that throwing out a cbicken-bofie caused the Neptune to rise suddenly from twenty to thirty yards, and Lunardi’s barometer fell three degrees on bis casting away his hat. On sand being thrown but from a balloon rapidly it (apparently!) pistes into the air, and, as the balloon slackens speed, falls again in a fine shower. The sea is the great bugbear of the aeronaut; to save the land he will almost drop upon it like a stone. Mr. Glaisher, who chose Wolverhampton for his favorite place of ascent, U lls us that an aeronaut cannot get far enough from the sea in England, and requires all the land room of a continent to make his voyage with freedom and comfort. Balloon's have a great reputation for danger, but the three thousand five hundred ascents which have been made have caused only fitteen deaths. The most critical mom nt of an air voyage is its last: to be able to take the ground well and skillfully requires the greatest presence of mind as well as thorough experience, and even then there is generally more or less of a crash— Appleton's Journal.