The Sheep, the Duck, and the Rooster: The First Passengers of the Age of Flight

On the morning of 19 September 1783, the gardens of the Palace of Versailles were crowded with spectators. King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette had taken their places in the royal enclosure. The Académie des sciences had sent its most distinguished members. Courtiers, diplomats, and curious Parisians who had made the journey from the capital jostled for position. They had come to witness something that no human being had ever seen before: a living creature ascending into the sky.

The creature in question — or rather, the creatures, for there were three of them — were a Montargis sheep named Montauciel (meaning “climb-to-the-sky”), a duck, and a rooster. They had been placed in a wicker basket attached to the base of a magnificent balloon: a 70-foot-tall aerostatic globe of cotton canvas and paper, painted sky-blue with lavish gold decorations including the King’s intertwining ciphers, fleurs-de-lys, and the twelve signs of the zodiac. The balloon was the creation of Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier, paper manufacturers from Annonay in the Ardèche, who had discovered the previous year that a bag filled with hot air would rise. They called their invention the Montgolfière. The world would call it the hot air balloon.

Why Animals First?

The decision to send animals before humans was not merely cautious — it was scientifically motivated. The great unknown of early aeronautics was not whether a balloon could rise, but whether a living creature could survive at altitude. The upper air was terra incognita: some natural philosophers believed it might be too thin to breathe, too cold to endure, or subject to electrical disturbances that would be fatal to any living thing. The three animals were chosen to test these hypotheses. The sheep was selected because its physiology was considered closest to that of a human being. The duck was included as a control: since ducks were known to fly at altitude, any ill effects suffered by the duck could not be attributed to the altitude itself. The rooster, which does not fly high, would serve as a second control.

The experiment was, in the language of the Enlightenment, a expérience — a systematic observation designed to answer a specific question. The Montgolfier brothers were not merely showmen; they were practitioners of the empirical method that the French Enlightenment had elevated to the highest form of human inquiry. The demonstration at Versailles was science performed before the court, science as spectacle, science as the proof of human reason’s power to unlock the secrets of nature.

The Flight

At approximately one o’clock in the afternoon, the balloon was released. It rose rapidly, carrying its three passengers to a height of approximately 1,500 feet, and drifted on the wind for eight minutes before descending in the Vaucresson woods, about two miles from the launch site. The King and the assembled crowd watched in silence as the balloon shrank to a point in the sky and then disappeared from view.

When the recovery party reached the landing site, they found the balloon deflated and the basket on its side — but the animals alive. The sheep was grazing calmly. The duck was unharmed. The rooster had suffered a minor injury to one wing, but this was later attributed not to the altitude but to a kick from the sheep during the flight. The experiment had succeeded beyond all expectation: living creatures could survive in the upper air. The way was open for human beings to follow.

Claude Louis Desrais’s magnificent hand-colored engraving of the scene — published in 1786 and reproduced on the front cover of our journal — captures the moment of ascent with the visual language of the Enlightenment: precise, elegant, and suffused with the wonder of a world in which the impossible had just become possible. The balloon rises above the palace gardens; the royal court observes from the foreground; and the three animal passengers, invisible in their basket, are already on their way into history.

Two Months Later: The First Humans Fly

The success of the Versailles demonstration cleared the way for the next step. On 21 November 1783, less than two months after the sheep, the duck, and the rooster had made their historic journey, the science teacher Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the infantry officer the Marquis François Laurent d’Arlandes became the first human beings to fly untethered. Their balloon — the same design as the Versailles balloon, its technical specifications documented in Desrais’s diagram on the back cover of our journal — rose from the Château de la Muette in the Bois de Boulogne and soared over Paris for 25 minutes, reaching a height of 3,000 feet and covering a distance of approximately five miles before landing safely on the Butte-aux-Cailles.

Pilâtre de Rozier later described the experience of that first human flight with a simplicity that captures its extraordinary nature: “We were conscious of rising in a most delightful manner.” The age of human aviation had begun — and it had begun, as all the greatest human achievements begin, with a question, an experiment, and three animals who had no idea they were making history.

Our Balloon Journal reproduces Desrais’s engraving of the Versailles demonstration on the front cover and his technical diagram of the balloon on the back — the spectacle and the science of the moment when humanity first looked up at the sky and decided to go there.

References
Badger, R. (1978). The Great Balloon Craze. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society.
Golinski, J. (1999). Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820. Cambridge University Press.
Holmes, R. (2008). The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. HarperPress.
Lynn, M.R. (2006). The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820. Pickering & Chatto.
Rolt, L.T.C. (1966). The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning 1783–1903. Walker and Company.