The Nadars, a photographic legend

The Nadars

fr

Dessin de Gustave Doré, 1863 

Printed poster with woodcut, 50 x 32.6 cm.
BnF, Prints and Photographs Department, YB3-2340 (15) PET FOL
© Bibliothèque nationale de France
"I wanted to kill off aerostatic flight by replacing it with purely mechanic craft. I resolved to ask aerostation itself to provide me with the means to create the new agents that would kill it. So I decided that I would build a huge balloon, one whose dimensions would surpass even those of the largest ones mentioned in the annals of aerostatic flight, one that could, in its two-storey wicker house, lift between forty and eighty persons, and then, thanks to its stupendous ascensional power, […] undertake aerial trajectories of hitherto unheard-of length."
Nadar, Memoires du Géant, 1864.