Airships past and present, together with chapters on the use of balloons in connection with meteorology, photography and the carrier pigeon . arsand swelling of the made some experi-ments with the galvanicbattery, and noted care-fully the flight of thebirds, as long as it waspossible to do so. Mycompanion complainedthat his head was swell-ing, and I found my ownhead swollen to such anextent that I could not put on my hat, and my eyes werebloodshot. We therefore descended. But I noticed the terrifiedaspect of the peasants, and as I had forgotten an importantexperiment, I made up my mind
Airships past and present, together with chapters on the use of balloons in connection with meteorology, photography and the carrier pigeon . arsand swelling of the made some experi-ments with the galvanicbattery, and noted care-fully the flight of thebirds, as long as it waspossible to do so. Mycompanion complainedthat his head was swell-ing, and I found my ownhead swollen to such anextent that I could not put on my hat, and my eyes werebloodshot. We therefore descended. But I noticed the terrifiedaspect of the peasants, and as I had forgotten an importantexperiment, I made up my mind to make another ascent. Wecontinued on our way till two oclock in the afternoon, when wecame to the ground near Wichtenbeck without any injury to our-selves or the balloon. The peasants evidently thought we hadcome from the infernal regions. The results of Robertsonsobservations have been lost; but he was either hopelessly incom-petent or an impostor, or, very possibly, both. He said he reachedan altitude of 24,300 ft., that his experiments with frictional elec-tricity were a failure, that a galvanic battery only gave five-sixths A. R. Fig. 147.—Apparatus for generating hydrogen. 242 AIKSHIPS PAST AND PEE SENT. of its normal current, and that the atmospheric electricity waspositive, as examined by his gold-leaf electroscope. Neither did theair contain as much oxygen at great heights as it did on the groundlevel. Laplace induced the Academie des Sciences to investigatethe truth of these assertions ; and consequently Gay-Lussac andBiot undertook an ascent for that purpose, with the result thatthe statements made by Kobertson were found to be rose to a height of 10,000 ft., and found that the experi-ments with frictional electricity worked perfectly ; the batterycontinued to give the same current, and the atmospheric chargewas alternately positive and negative. Gay-Lussac undertook afurther ascent alone, and reached an altitude of 23,000 ft. Hefound that the perc
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