Jean Samuel Pauly

[1][2] Pauly started working as a carriage builder and mechanic in his father's workshop; he was constantly looking for technical improvements (such as a self-lubricating axle) and also ways to increase the comfort of passengers.

He later moved away to settle in nearby Bern in order to sell his inventions to the rich patricians there; a written testimony advertising his own carriages and promoting his technical successes may be seen in the city's trade handbook of 1796.

Under the devout sponsorship and patronage of General Ney, he moved into a beautiful apartment in Paris; under the gallicised name of Jean Pauly, he commissioned Aime Bolle, the city's most famous balloon designer, to build an airship for him in accordance with his plans drawn up in Bern.

Its maiden voyage on 22 August 1804 in the castle park of Sceaux was, from a technical point of view at least, quite successful, and a year later, on 4 November 1805, at half past three in the afternoon, the Flying Fish rose again.

(For the planned return to Tivoli Park, he wrote that, regrettably, he had needed the muscular strength of an additional man, so the Flying Fish drifted west for another eighty kilometers, landing four and a half hours later at dusk, near the Cathedral of Chartres.)

Seamstresses were hired to sew the outer fish-shaped shell of the hydrogen-filled airship in sevenfold layers from the dried intestines of 70,000 oxen; a second, spherical balloon would provide pressure equalization inside the fish.

Egg and Pauly announced that, if the weather was calm on maiden flights, they would steer the fish-shaped balloon "in circles around London", but in strong winds they would take a different course but still return to the starting position.