Loading episode…

Info

Read along · the story, in full

The Globe That Fell on Gonesse

The launch of the first hydrogen balloon by Jacques Charles on August 27, 1783

A misheard rumor sent a Paris physicist racing to build a flying machine no one had ever seen, filled with a gas that could kill him. When it came back to earth in a farming village, the terrified locals met it with pitchforks.

7 chapters · 12 sourcesBy HistoraiPublished August 27, 2026

Read the full transcript

1783 CE

A City in Love With the Sky

Paris, summer 1783, gripped by balloon fever
Montgolfier brothers fly a balloon at Annonay, June 4
Physicist Jacques Charles becomes obsessed

Ada: In the summer of seventeen eighty-three, Paris could talk about almost nothing but the sky. In the salons, over coffee, in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, everyone was repeating the same astonishing news from a small town in the south.

Theo: This is Historai, by the way — I'm Theo, that's Ada, and today we're chasing a rumor that built a flying machine. So what was the news, Ada?

Ada: On the fourth of June, two paper-makers, the Montgolfier brothers, had let loose an enormous cloth-and-paper globe over the town of Annonay. It rose more than a thousand feet into the air, on its own, in front of a crowd of local officials.

Theo: With nobody aboard, nothing pulling it — it just went up. To people who'd never seen it, that must have looked like a miracle.

Ada: It nearly did. And one man in Paris, a physicist and star public lecturer named Jacques Charles, heard about it and became obsessed.

Theo: But Charles had heard only half the story — and the half he got wrong set everything in motion.

Summer 1783

The Useful Misunderstanding

Charles wrongly assumed the Montgolfiers used hydrogen
Hydrogen isolated by Henry Cavendish, 1766
Public subscription led by Faujas de Saint-Fond
Partnered with the Robert brothers

Ada: Here's what Charles knew. He knew the Montgolfiers had sent up a huge globe, and that it had risen on its own. What he did not know was how they'd done it.

Theo: They'd just burned straw and wool under an open bag — hot air. Simple, almost crude.

Ada: Exactly. But nobody told Charles that. He assumed a physicist's answer. He guessed they'd filled the balloon with what they called inflammable air — hydrogen.

Theo: The gas Henry Cavendish had isolated back in seventeen sixty-six. Much lighter than ordinary air.

Ada: Right — roughly a fraction of the weight, so it lifts far harder than hot air ever could. Charles reasoned that if that gas was the secret, he could do it better and higher. The whole thing was built on a wrong guess.

Theo: A productive mistake, then. He's essentially reinventing the wheel because he didn't see the first wheel clearly.

Ada: And he wasn't rich. A naturalist named Faujas de Saint-Fond ran a public subscription — Parisians literally pitching in coins to fund the experiment.

Theo: Crowdfunding a science project in seventeen eighty-three. I love it.

Ada: He also brought in the Robert brothers, Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis, gifted instrument makers. But to chase this rumor, he first had to trap a gas no one had ever held in the open air.

August 1783

Silk, Acid, and Iron

Rubberized silk invented to hold leaking hydrogen
Small globe: ~13 feet across, 35 cubic meters
Half a tonne of iron plus acid made the gas
Days to fill; noxious fumes sickened workers

Ada: The first problem was the bag itself. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule there is — it slips through ordinary cloth like water through a net.

Theo: So how do you hold something that basically leaks through everything?

Ada: The Robert brothers came up with a clever fix. They dissolved rubber in turpentine and painted it onto silk — rubberized silk, gas-tight and light. It's one of the real inventions of this whole episode.

Theo: And the balloon was small, right? Not the giant thing at Annonay.

Ada: Tiny by comparison — about thirteen feet across, maybe thirty-five cubic meters. But filling it was a nightmare.

Theo: This is the sulfuric acid and iron part.

Ada: Pour acid over iron filings and you get hydrogen — but they needed roughly half a tonne of iron and a quarter tonne of acid. The reaction ran hot, the gas came out expanded, so it had to cool and be topped up over days.

Theo: And the fumes must have been brutal.

Ada: Workers were genuinely sickened by it. They moved the globe by night on the twenty-sixth, torches lining the streets — and all Paris was coming to watch.

1783 CE

The Champ de Mars Launch

27 August 1783, around 5 p.m., in the rain
Tens of thousands paid to watch
Rose ~3,000 feet, gone in two minutes
Franklin among the spectators

Ada: By late afternoon on the twenty-seventh of August, the Champ de Mars was packed. Tens of thousands of people, and this time they'd paid admission — Parisians reaching for their purses to stand in the rain and watch.

Theo: It was actually raining? For the big debut?

Ada: Pouring, on and off. Nobody left. Around five o'clock a cannon fired as the signal, and they let the little globe go.

Theo: And it just — went.

Ada: It shot up. Within two minutes it had climbed to something like three thousand feet, straight into the low clouds, and vanished from sight. The crowd was stunned into silence, then roared.

Theo: Wasn't Benjamin Franklin somewhere in that crowd?

Ada: He was — the American minister in Paris, watching it go. And there's a famous exchange, though historians warn the wording is uncertain. Someone supposedly asked, what use is it?

Theo: And Franklin's reply?

Ada: What is the use of a new-born baby? Whether he really said it or not, it caught the mood exactly — nobody knew what this thing was for yet.

Theo: So it flies off into the clouds and everyone celebrates. But somewhere to the north, the machine was already coming down among people who had never been warned.

1783 CE

The Monster of Gonesse

Balloon landed ~13 miles north of Paris
Villagers attacked it with pitchforks and knives
Remains dragged behind a horse
Louis XVI issued a reassuring proclamation

Ada: About forty-five minutes after it left the Champ de Mars, the balloon came down roughly thirteen miles to the north, in a farming village called Gonesse.

Theo: And these are people who've never heard of any of this. No pamphlet, no warning, nothing.

Ada: Nothing. Imagine you're in the fields and this thing falls out of the sky — half-collapsed, still shifting and hissing as the last gas escapes, and reeking of acid.

Theo: So it's writhing on the ground and it stinks. To them that's not a science experiment, that's a creature.

Ada: A monster, or a demon dropped from the heavens. The villagers went at it with pitchforks, flails, and knives, tearing it apart.

Theo: They actually attacked it.

Ada: They did — and then tied the shredded remains to a horse and dragged them across the fields to be sure it was dead.

Theo: So one crowd cheers a miracle while another kills it with farm tools. Same afternoon.

Ada: That gap was so alarming that within weeks Louis the Sixteenth issued a royal proclamation reassuring people these globes were harmless science. And for all the panic, Charles had quietly built the machinery every balloon would use for centuries.

December 1783

The Man Who Saw Two Sunsets

Charles's design: hydrogen, net, top valve, open neck, sand ballast
1 December 1783: first manned hydrogen flight from the Tuileries
Flew ~2 hours and roughly 22 miles before a vast crowd
Ascending alone, Charles watched the sun set twice

Ada: Now here's what gets lost behind the panic. In building that little globe, Charles had actually designed the balloon — the real thing, the pieces we'd still recognize today.

Theo: Meaning what, specifically? What did he get right?

Ada: Hydrogen for lift, a net draped over the envelope to spread the load, a valve at the top to release gas, an open neck at the bottom, and sand ballast to control the climb. That's the whole grammar of gas ballooning, invented at once.

Theo: And he wasn't done. He actually went up himself, right?

Ada: On the first of December, from the Tuileries Garden. Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert climbed aboard a manned hydrogen balloon before a crowd some accounts put at four hundred thousand.

Theo: That's most of Paris standing in a garden looking up.

Ada: They flew about two hours, some twenty-two miles. Then Charles dropped Robert off and went up alone — and rose so fast he watched the sun set a second time that day.

Theo: He literally out-climbed the sunset. What a thing to see.

Ada: His ears ached terribly at altitude, and he never flew again. But two rival ways to fly had been born within weeks of each other — so which one really lasted?

1783 CE

Hot Air Against Hydrogen

Two rival balloons born weeks apart in 1783
Montgolfier: simple hot air, needed a fire
Charles: hydrogen, net, valve, ballast
The Charliere design endured nearly two centuries

Ada: So by the end of seventeen eighty-three, France had two completely different flying machines, born only weeks apart. The Montgolfiers' hot-air balloon, and Charles's hydrogen one.

Theo: And they work on totally different principles. One heats ordinary air, the other traps a lighter gas.

Ada: Right. The hot-air balloon was simpler and safer to fill — no acid, no poison fumes. But it needed a fire burning under it the whole time, and it couldn't stay up as long.

Theo: Whereas Charles's gas balloon flew farther and higher, but was a chemical ordeal to inflate.

Ada: And here's the thing that surprised me — it was Charles's design that endured. The gas envelope, the net, the valve, the ballast. That package, the Charliere, stayed essentially the same for nearly two centuries.

Theo: So the man who got the Montgolfiers' method wrong ended up defining what a balloon actually is.

Ada: Exactly. His mistake pointed him at a better answer than the one he was copying.

Theo: When you line it all up — a misheard rumor sends a physicist chasing the wrong gas, that wrong gas turns out to be the right one, one crowd cheers and another crowd stabs the thing with pitchforks.

Ada: And what stays with me is how thin the line was between wonder and terror. The same object was a miracle in Paris and a demon in Gonesse — the only difference was who had been told what it was.

Theo: If you ever want to stop us mid-story and ask something — why the hydrogen didn't just explode, what became of Charles — you can, any time.

Ada: And there's a whole other story in the men who first rode a Montgolfier fire balloon into the sky — if you're curious, it's one tap away.

Theo: This was Historai — where history answers back.

Research record