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This Week in History

January 3 - 9, 1785 & 1793

Benj. Franklin and Friends Lay the Basis for Manned Flight

This new year, which will commemorate Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthday on Jan. 17, begins with the anniversaries of two events which ultimately contributed to the exploration of space. On Jan. 7, 1785 a manned balloon flight successfully crossed the English Channel from England to France, and on Jan. 9, 1793, the first American exhibition of manned lighter-than-air flight took place in Philadelphia.

The balloons, which were developed toward the end of the 18th Century, are often thought of nowadays as beautiful toys—a pleasant concept, but a mere sidebar to aviation history. That is not the case, as Franklin himself knew. Sir Joseph Banks, a leading botanist and president of the British Royal Society from 1778 to 1820, had known Franklin in his London days, and corresponded with him in Paris. Although ostensibly a man of science, Banks looked at ballooning from a Newtonian worldview, and wrote to Franklin that, "I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania [until] some experiment likely to prove beneficial either to society or science is proposed."

Franklin had told Banks that experimenting with balloons would someday "pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception." He answered Banks' objection by writing that "It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter until we can see to what use that power may be applied. When we have learned to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement." When a spectator at one of the early balloon launchings asked Franklin what this new invention could be used for, Franklin gave his famous answer: "What is the use of a new-born baby?"

Although scientists had been fascinated with the possibility of human flight at least since the time of ancient Greece, direct work on flying machines did not yield the desired results. The early days of aviation actually stemmed from research on the composition and properties of gases, one of those gases being the air itself. European scientific research had been badly disrupted during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), but after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, coordination among scientists in the various European countries was resumed. When one of Ben Franklin's Boston mentors, Increase Mather, travelled to London in 1688 to try to maintain the independent charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he met with many of the scientists working on the composition of gases. Over the period of his four-year stay, Mather saw Robert Boyle almost weekly, and attended many meetings of the Royal Society. He also probably talked with the leading scientist in the field, Christiaan Huygens, when he visited London during Mather's stay there.

Experiments with Gas and Electricity

During Franklin's lifetime, other researchers had taken up the work, and the composition of ordinary air was established. Many scientists worked with both gases and electricity, since the latter could be used to separate out the components of a gas or to combine two components to produce a third, as in the work of Henry Cavendish. Franklin had encouraged Joseph Priestly, an English minister, to make scientific experiments, and in 1767, Priestly authored, with Franklin's collaboration, the "History and Present State of Electricity." Priestly also experimented with gases, and in 1774 he produced what he called "dephlogisticated air," which later would be produced by French chemist Antoine Lavoisier and named "oxygen."

Lavoisier was a member of the French grouping which included Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, and Claude Berthollet. This republican faction, also known as the "American faction," worked closely with Benjamin Franklin in supporting the American Revolution.

They also attempted to carry on the work of Jean Baptiste Colbert, the French statesman who had built up France's infrastructure through public works and expanded education. Lavoisier himself was responsible for initiating the building of canals, the establishment of savings banks, and the installation of street lighting in Paris. In June of 1783, Lavoisier published his research on the gas discovered by Henry Cavendish in England, and named it "hydrogen."

This research on gases came to the attention of Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier, two brothers who ran a paper manufactory near Lyons, France. Joseph had developed a strong interest in chemistry, and had set up a small laboratory. Jacques, an architect, had invented the first vellum paper. While working with samples of their paper, Joseph discovered that heated air inside a paper bag could lift it to the ceiling. The brothers collaborated for two years on their hot-air balloon project, and first conducted an unmanned flight from the market place of Annonay.

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