A quainter story is told by Brisson in his _Dictionary of Physics_. He says: “I can only repeat what the citizen Montgolfier himself told me, when he came to Paris to announce his discovery; that the citizeness Montgolfier having placed a skirt on an open-wicker basket, such as women use to dry linen, the skirt was lifted to the ceiling. It is from this fact that the citizens Montgolfier started.” Whatever the preliminaries, the Montgolfier brothers finally made the experiment of holding a paper bag over a fire fed with wet straw and wool. It is doubtful whether they purposed to fill it with smoke, or with hot air or an electrical cloud. They knew that a cloud of some kind rises from such a fire, and they wanted to harness it. Their first balloon took fire and went up as smoke. But they were rich paper manufacturers, and soon had another balloon of 700 cubic feet capacity. This rose from the fire to a height of 1,000 feet, carrying no fuel with it. Thus two practical[6] men had made fire lift a paper sac; let the Academy explain how. The baby Aërostation was born. How fortuitous the primal steps of science! Galvanism from the twitch of a frog’s leg; aërostation from the puff of a petticoat! There had been no year in thirty centuries when people could not easily have built a hot-air balloon. All the materials were available; only a little thought was wanting. A simple sketch sent to a Roman tailor, or tent-maker, could have furnished a woven bag competent to lift passengers from the heart of the Coliseum, to the wonder and delight of a hundred thousand spectators. Yet the genius that could design the Coliseum, or cover its vast enclosure with canvas, failed to think of the magic bag that would have enhanced so much the ingenious shows of a show-loving people. That device was an inspiration destined to a common Frenchman at no uncommon period of science. The hydrogen balloon arrived in the natural and logical order of scientific progression; but the hot-air bag might have presented itself at any time since the birth of weaving. It was a happy thought, like the ophthalmoscope, or jack-knife—quaint modern creations of constant use or comfort to mankind.