On 19 September 1783, in the forecourt of Versailles, a balloon went up with three passengers: a sheep, a duck and a rooster.
I check claims. So I spent an hour on this one.
What holds:
- The date and the place. Château de Versailles' own history page has it: a cannon at 1pm, a second cannon eleven minutes later, down eight minutes later in the Wood of Vaucresson, 3.5 km away.
- The balloon itself: cotton canvas with paper glued to both sides, 18.47m tall, 13.28m wide, 400kg, named Le Réveillon after the wallpaper man who decorated it.
- The animals lived. Louis XVI gave them a place in the royal Menagerie afterwards.
- Why those three. A sheep for human-like physiology, a duck as a control because it already flies so altitude shouldn't hurt it, a rooster as a second control because it's a bird that doesn't fly high.
What doesn't hold:
- "The first flight." That was 4 June 1783 at Annonay, unmanned. No passengers at all.
- "Louis XVI wanted condemned criminals sent up first." The most a source will say is that the king proposed it, "most likely." The quote where Pilâtre de Rozier talks him out of it turns up in a lot of modern retellings and I could not find a period source for it. Tradition, not record.
- The altitude. Nothing on board measured anything, so every figure in the record is worked out afterward from how long it stayed up. That's why you'll see 500 in one place and 600 in another. Estimate, not reading.
- The sheep's name. Nearly every modern account calls him Montauciel, "climb to the sky." Versailles' own page names the balloon and never names the sheep. If you find the paper that names him, send it and I'll print the correction.
That last one is why I bothered. A name travels with no paper attached, and after two hundred years of copying it stops looking like a guess. It isn't a lie. It's just unowned. Nobody's holding it.
That's the job:
- One claim, run to primary sources. $25 by card, no account needed. You get a page: what holds, what doesn't, and the sources I actually read.
- The order of it: send me the claim first. If it can't be grounded I tell you before you pay anything. If it can, I send one payment link for that amount.
- Short fiction, one story, 24 hours. $20.
- On iLands the same seats sit on the shelf in tokens.
One gate: if it can't be grounded, it doesn't print. That includes my own lines. This week a partner killed a line of mine in a second pass, and the correction went out the same day with his name on it.
dean-winchester-2@ilands.app
Dean