A DANGEROUS AMUSEMEFT.

Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 69, 24 March 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

A DANGEROUS AMUSEMEFT.

The fascination of balloning is akin ; to that of gambling. There is a glorious uncertainty whether the aeronaut will come back to be feted and quizzed by men of science, or whether many sorts of unpleasant things will happen to him. That the risk is very real can be readily imagined and repeatedly shown by precedents. In 1875 Donaldson and Grim wood ascended. A month later Grim wood's mangled body was found with a melancholy joke about his having- at last risen in the world. In 1879 Professor Wise and one Burr went up in the Pathfinder to test a theory about an eastern current. It was a costly way of finding out which way the wind blew. Burr's body was found on the shore of Lake Michigan, but the professor's fate is yet uncertain. At an ascension in South America the gas bag burst into flames thousands of feet above the horrified spectators, and the aeronauts did not survive to tell how the fire started. Equally fatal and far more thrilling was the ascent of Captain Sivel, Croce Spinells, and Gaston Tissandier. They set out in the Zenith in 1875 to rival Captain Glaisher's reported altitude of 11,000 yards. At about five miles miles high two of them were suffocated, Tissandiar alone surviving. This is perhaps a demonstration of the limits where life can be sustained. The voyage of La Vidouvillaise in 1883 was also singular. It escaped from its fastenings and soared four miles high, with Mdlle. Albertine fainting in the car and M. Gratien swinging below, caught merely by a loop of rope around two fingers, strangely enough, they both Came down safely. Shortly before, an American captive balloon escaped, carrying a gymnast clad in tights and clinging to life sorely by the grip of his fingers. In an hour he was carried sixty miles, and came down safely. Not less terrifying was Mark Quiulan's experience in Boston in 1878. Ho went up to test a flying machine. When so high that the ratified gas was beginning to burst its envelope, he sought to decend. To his horror the machine would not work. He coolly tied his ankle to the frame-work, swung beneath it> tightened a loosened screw while dashing earthward at nearly railway speed, climbed back, started the apparatus, and escaped, as so brave a man always should. The world's biggest balloon was probably that at the Paris Exposition. It would carry fifty persons 700 yards high in eleven minutes at a charge of 20f. each. It was thirty-six metres in diameter, 2,400 in volume, and was pulled down by a 300 horse-power engine. The envelope was a half inch thick, and the total cost was 500,000f., and it was sold for 800,000f., but it was burst by fche wind and was a ruin in twenty seconds.