Wonderful Balloon Ascents; Or, The Conquest of the Skies

At the same time, Montgolfier was busy constructing, at the request of the Academy of Sciences, a balloon seventy feet high and forty in diameter, with which it was proposed to repeat the experiment of Annonay. He took up his quarters in the magnificent gardens of his friend Reveillon, proprietor of the royal manufactory of stained paper in the Faubourg St. Antoine. The new balloon was of a very singular shape: the upper part represented a prism, twenty-four feet high the top was a pyramid of the same height; the lower part was a truncated cone, twenty feet in depth. It was made of packing-cloth, lined with good paper, both inside and out.