Etude des grands déplacements des airs. Flux aériens supérieurs, etc. Fleuves aériens (inférieurs) etc.

First edition, bringing together articles previously published in the Revue générale and the Revue maritime, illustrated with thirty-one figures, including five maps.

Publisher's brown half-cloth binding in the Bradel style, authors' names and title gilt-lettered on the spine. Rubbing to the binding, bumped corners, occasional light foxing to a few leaves, and a small marginal loss to page 7, not affecting the text.

We have located only one copy of this work in WorldCat, held by the Smithsonian Libraries.

Signed autograph presentation inscription from Edouard Deburaux to M. Jean Benoit on the front free endpaper: "affectueusement à M. Jean Benoit E. Deburaux".

Edouard Deburaux, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and a military ballooning officer, often known by his pseudonym Léo Dex, and the engineer Maurice Dibos, both keen enthusiasts of aeronautics, published several technical works and adventure novels devoted to ballooning, some written in collaboration. These narratives, which Deburaux himself termed "romans aérostatiques", followed in the footsteps of Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon, in which the balloon serves both as the protagonists' means of transport and as the driving force of the plot, against the backdrop of an African continent then at the centre of colonial rivalries. The genre drew upon the fascination with balloon flight that flourished during the second half of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the French army expanded its use of observation balloons, establishing the Central Military Aeronautical Facility at Chalais-Meudon in 1877; in 1884, La France, the airship designed by Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs, completed the first closed-circuit flight by a steerable aircraft.
The present volume, which includes a section devoted to aerial rivers, forms part of a series of studies of major atmospheric currents, which the two authors hoped to harness for long-distance balloon journeys. Deburaux attempted to put their theories to the test in January 1903, near Gabès in Tunisia, where he launched unmanned balloons in an effort to demonstrate that a free balloon could cross the Sahara carried by the winter trade winds. The experiment proved unsuccessful, and Deburaux died prematurely the following year.

Written by two specialists in ballooning who were also authors of adventure fiction, this technical study of atmospheric currents bears witness to the dream of conquering the skies by balloon, a dream that Jules Verne had given literary expression to several decades earlier.