"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.