In 1887 Walter Wellman described in the _Associated Press_ a steel vacuum balloon 144 feet in diameter and 654 feet long in which a Chicago doctor proposed to carry passengers to the North Pole, at incredible speed, if they would furnish him $130,000 to meet the expenses of construction. “Here is a most excellent opportunity,” wrote Wellman, “for all who would like to win fame by being one of the party which shall set foot upon that icy _ignis fatuus_ of many nations and two centuries.” Two decades later Mr. Wellman organized, after his own ideas, an aërial expedition to the North Pole; but he no longer favored starting from Chicago in a vacuum balloon with a party of stockholders. It may be added that the inventor of the great steel vacuum balloon, after organizing the Trans-Continental Aërial Navigation Company, and failing to raise all of the $130,000, sought aid from the national government. Here was an interesting situation; a doctor ignorant of mechanics, with the plans for a mammoth and impossible balloon, appealing for aid to a congress, supremely shy of air ships, even though recommended by its ablest military advisers. But in this case there was a capable lobby. The bill for this physically impossible balloon actually passed the House, and was finally defeated only by the timely effort of a few scientific men who, by easy calculation, proved the absurdity of the invention. As the reader may like to see a mathematical proof of the impossibility of a vacuum balloon, since such projects arise frequently, the argument is given in Appendix I. PART I GROWTH OF AËROSTATION CHAPTER I EARLY HISTORY OF PASSIVE BALLOONS Oh, that I could as smoke arise, That rolls its black wreathes through the air; Mix with the clouds, that o’er the skies Show their light forms, and disappear: Or like the dust be tossed By every sportive wind till all be lost! —ÆSCHYLUS. If desire is sometimes the mother of invention, doubtless the wish to “mix with the clouds,” or “as smoke arise,” suggested to man his first means of aërial locomotion. Indeed this is openly avowed by Joseph Montgolfier. “Smoke rises in the chimney; why not encage this smoke, and have an available force.” But before describing his fundamental experiments of 1783, let us notice the less conspicuous ones, though not less philosophical, of his immediate predecessors in the development of aëronautic science.