THE ORIGINS OF FLIGHT AND MILITARY AVIATION7Piltre de Rozier and Romain plummeting to their deaths before horrified onlookers.THE USE OF MILITARY BALLOONSAlthough some observers saw the balloon as a novelty, others quickly saw its military potential as Lana de Terzi had anticipated a century earlier and as Joseph Montgolfier had envisioned when he began his experiments. Indeed, on 17 October 1783, two days after Piltre de Rozier made the first manned ascent, Andr Giraud de Vilette accompanied Piltre de Rozier on a tethered ascent and immediately recognized the balloon potential for military reconnaissance. Three days later, on 20 October, he published an account of his flight in Journal de Paris, and emphasized how the balloon could provide commanders with useful information on the location of enemy positions and recognition of enemy movements. The Englishman William Cooke published a pamphlet that reiterated the balloon value in reconnaissance and stressed its importance as a first-line observation and communication post that could provide early warning of an invasion force landing on the English coast. By 1784 anonymous pamphlets were predicting that the balloon could also potentially serve offensive purposes by transporting troops and equipment. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as the United States ambassador to France, even speculated that balloons could be used to carry troops across enemy lines and noted that the cost of building a thousand balloons equaled that of a single ship-ofthe-line. Despite these observations, no effort would be made to incorporate balloons for military purposes until after the outbreak of the French Revolution and the wars that it unleashed. With the outbreak of war in 1792, the new revolutionary regime in France faced enormous pressures and thus turned to extraordinary means of defending itself. Joseph Montgolfier developed a plan for using balloons to drop bombs on Toulon, which had been occupied by the British. Encouraged by a report made by the famous mathematician Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, known as he Organizer of Victory,�and his fellow members of the Committee of Public Safety authorized chemist Jean Marie-Joseph Coutelle to construct balloons for reconnaissance and observation, signaling, and disseminating propaganda. Based at the Chteau de Meudon, located on the outskirts of Paris, Coutelle and his crew eventually
