This splendid achievement incited two Frenchmen to attempt a counter voyage which ended disastrously. On June 15, 1785, Pilâtre de Rozier and M. Romain set out from Boulogne on a voyage from France to England, in a compound balloon composed of a hydrogen balloon forty feet in diameter, below which was suspended a fire balloon ten feet in diameter. They hoped by judicious stoking of the lower balloon to obviate the sinking tendency suffered by Blanchard and Jeffries. But the smaller globe proved a fatal auxiliary. Scarcely a quarter of an hour after launching, the whole apparatus was aflame at an altitude of 3,000 feet, and presently fell in charred and hideous fragments upon the seashore. M. Romain still showed some signs of life, but Pilâtre de Rozier was completely dead and all his bones were broken. They were the first martyrs in the cause of the new science. Poor De Rozier knew on starting that his apparatus was in bad condition, but he had received for the purpose a sum of money from a distinguished patron, and therefore felt obliged in honor to attempt the voyage. He was twenty-eight years old and engaged to be married to a young lady in the convent at Boulogne, who eight days after the catastrophe which robbed her of her fiancé, died brokenhearted and in convulsions. CHAPTER II PRACTICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PASSIVE BALLOONS The next important advance in practical ballooning was made by the substitution of coal gas for hydrogen. This was England’s contribution to an art which previously had not greatly flourished west of the Channel. It was a contribution following the natural growth of science; for in 1814 coal gas began generally to be used for lighting London, and seven years later for inflating balloons. This valuable innovation was made by the famous aëronaut, Charles Green, on the occasion of his first ascension, made July 19, 1821, the coronation day of George IV. The new method largely superseded the old, extending throughout the world with the spread of gas lighting; and it gave a powerful stimulus to aëronautics by rendering inflation cheap and convenient. Mr. Green himself made 526 ascensions during his life, or at the rate of one cruise a month for nearly forty-four years. In due time, every country had its professional aëronauts, and finally its amateurs, who, forming themselves into aëro clubs, devoted themselves to racing in free balloons, inflated quite usually from a city gas supply.