Gaston Tissandier - Histoire de mes ascensions - 1887

TISSANDIER (Gaston). History of my ascents. Account of forty aerial voyages (1868-1886). Paris, Maurice Dreyfous, 1887. Thick octavo, portrait frontispiece, xxiv, 308 p., dark green half calf, spine with gilt-ruled panels and gold fleuron ornaments and corner pieces, boards with blue and brown granulated paper, marbled endpapers (binding of the period). Seventh edition, entirely rewritten and expanded with several chapters.

Chimist, aeronaut, and popularizer, Gaston Tissandier (1843-1899) founded the journal La Nature (1873) and was one of the leading figures of scientific ballooning in the nineteenth century. The book first appeared in 1878 under the title “Twenty-Four Aerial Voyages,” then was expanded edition after edition. This edition prolongs the narrative to forty ascents, from 1868 to 1886.

The author’s portrait is engraved after a photograph by Nadar (1820-1910). The work traces the invention of balloons, by the Montgolfier brothers Joseph (1740-1810) and Étienne (1745-1799) Montgolfier of Annonay, up to the physicist Jacques Charles (1746-1823), and mentions Alphonse Pénaud’s mechanical bird (1850-1880). It then covers the great ascents: the early journeys from Calais, the sortie from besieged Paris by balloon in September 1870, then the catastrophe of the Zenith (15 April 1875), in which Théodore Sivel (1834-1875) and Joseph Crocé-Spinelli (1845-1875) perished, and the monument raised at Ciron. The narrative ends with the first dirigible steered by an electric motor, tested on 8 October 1883, and with the nascent technique of aerial photography. Numerous illustrations in the text by his brother Albert Tissandier (1839-1906), an architect and draftsman, make this work a remarkable iconographic source.

Overall in fair to average condition due to foxing and damp stains, the binding is slightly rubbed; other defects are minor.