TO JOHN INGENHOUSZ. On Balloons, and their Probable Importance. DEAR FRIEND, Passy, 16 January, 1784. I have this day received your favor of the 2d instant. Every information in my power, respecting the balloons, I sent you just before Christmas, contained in copies of my letters to Sir Joseph Banks. There is no secret in the affair, and I make no doubt that a person coming from you would easily obtain a sight of the different balloons of Montgolfier and Charles, with all the instructions wanted; and, if you undertake to make one, I think it extremely proper and necessary to send an ingenious man here for that purpose; otherwise, for want of attention to some particular circumstance, or of not being acquainted with it, the experiment might miscarry, which, in an affair of so much public expectation, would have bad consequences, draw upon you a great deal of censure, and affect your reputation. It is a serious thing to draw out from their affairs all the inhabitants of a great city and its environs, and a disappointment makes them angry. At Bordeaux lately a person pretended to send up a balloon, and had received money from many people, but not being able to make it rise, the populace were so exasperated that they pulled down his house, and had like to have killed him. It appears, as you observe, to be a discovery of great importance, and what may possibly give a new turn to human affairs. Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect of it; since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions. Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence, as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief, before a force could be brought together to repel them? It is a pity that any national jealousy should, as you imagine it may, have prevented the English from prosecuting the experiment, since they are such ingenious mechanicians, that in their hands it might have made a more rapid progress towards perfection, and all the utility it is capable of affording. The balloon of Messrs. Charles and Robert was really filled with inflammable air. The quantity being great, it was expensive, and tedious filling, requiring two or three days and nights constant labor. It had a soupape, or valve, near the top, which they could open by pulling a string, and thereby let out some air when they had a mind to descend; and they discharged some of their ballast of sand when they would rise again. A great deal of air must have been let out when they landed, so that the loose part might envelope one of them; yet, the car being lightened by that one getting out of it, there was enough left to carry up the other rapidly. They had no fire with them. That is used only in M. Montgolfier's globe, which is open at bottom, and straw constantly burnt to keep it up. This kind is sooner and cheaper filled; but must be of much greater dimensions to carry up the same weight; since air rarefied by heat is only twice as light as common air, and inflammable air ten times lighter. M. Morveau, a famous chemist at Dijon, has discovered an inflammable air that will cost only a twenty-fifth part of the price of what is made by oil of vitriol poured on iron filings. They say it is made from sea coal. Its comparative weight is not mentioned. I am as ever, my dear friend, Yours most affectionately, TO BENJAMIN VAUGHAN. Fire supposed to exist in the State of a MY DEAR FRIEND, Passy, 29 April, 1784. I received your kind letters of the 16th and 20th instant. I thank you for your philosophical news. We have none here. I see your philosophers are in the way of finding out at last what fire is. I have long been of opinion, that it exists everywhere in the state of a subtile fluid; that too much of that fluid in our flesh gives us the sensation we call heat; too little, cold; its vibrations, light. That all solid or fluid substances, which are inflammable, have been composed of it; their dissolution in returning to their original fluid state, we call fire. This subtile fluid is attracted by plants and animals in their growth, and consolidated; is attracted by other substances, thermometers, &c. variously; has a particular affinity with. water, and will quit many other bodies to attach itself to water, and go off with it in evaporation. Adieu. Yours, most sincerely, B. FRANKLIN. Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures.* Passy, May, 1784. There seems to be a region high in the air over all countries, where it is always winter, where frost exists continually, since in the midst of summer, on the surface of the earth, ice falls often from above, in the form of hail. Hailstones, of the great weight we sometimes find them, did not probably acquire their magnitude before they began to descend. The air, being eight hundred times rarer than water, is unable to support it but in the shape of vapor, a state in which its particles are separated. As soon as they are condensed by the cold of the upper region, so as to form a drop, that drop begins to fall. If it freezes into a grain of ice, that ice descends. In descending, both the drop of water and the grain of ice are augmented by particles of the vapor they pass through in falling, and which they' condense by coldness, and attach to themselves. It is possible, that, in summer, much of what is rain. when it arrives at the surface of the earth, might have been snow when it began its descent; but, being thawed in passing through the warm air near the surface, it is changed from snow into rain. How immensely cold must be the original particle of hail, which forms the centre of the future hailstone, since it is capable of communicating sufficient cold, if I may so speak, to freeze all the mass of vapor condensed round it, and form a lump of perhaps six or eight ounces in weight! * First printed in the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, Vol. II. p. 357. It was communicated to the Society by Dr. Percival, and read December 22d, 1784.- EDITOR. When, in summer time, the sun is high, and continues long every day above the horizon, his rays strike the earth more directly, and with longer continuance, than in the winter; hence the surface is more heated, and to a greater depth, by the effect of those rays. When rain falls on the heated earth, and soaks down into it, it carries down with it a great part of the heat, which by that means descends still deeper. The mass of earth, to the depth perhaps of thirty feet, being thus heated to a certain degree, continues to retain its heat for some time. Thus the first snows, that fall in the beginning of winter, seldom lie long on the surface, but are soon melted, and soon absorbed. After which, the winds, that blow over the country on which the snows had fallen, are not rendered so cold as they would have been, by those snows, if they had remained, and thus the approach of the severity of winter is retarded; and the extreme degree of its cold is not always at the time we might expect it, viz. when the sun is at its greatest distance, and the day shortest, but some time after that period, according to the English proverb, which says, "As the day lengthens, the cold strengthens;" the causes of refrigeration continuing to operate, while the sun returns too slowly, and his force continues too weak, to counteract them. During several of the summer months of the year 1783, when the effects of the sun's rays to heat the earth in these northern regions should have been the greatest, there existed a constant fog over all Europe, and great part of North America. This fog was of a permanent nature; it was dry, and the rays of the sun seemed to have little effect towards dissipating it, as they easily do a moist fog, arising from water. They were indeed rendered so faint in passing through it, |
