Annonay

Gloves were made entirely by hand, and the glove maker, whether designer or workman, was, in the true sense, an artist.

patterns cut from thin boards were laid on the leather and the shape traced with lead pencil these designs were cut out with a pair of long scissors the parts were then sewed together in order to keep the stitches uniform the pieces were placed between a pair of jaws the holding edges of which were serrated with fine saw teeth and the sewer by passing the needle forwards and backwards between each of these teeth secured neat even length stitches the embroidery on the backs was done with very great care and necessarily consumed much time although these gloves possessed the charm peculiar to most hand-made articles the matter of fit was purely accidental for it depended partly upon the elasticity of the leather and even more upon the skill of the maker in point of skill no glove makers in the world at that time surpassed those of grenoble relying wholly upon the art of her workmen and the dexterity of her sewing women the ancient glove city still set the standard of excellence for the rest of europe even in the years when she was not in a position to turn out so many gloves nor sell her products so cheaply as paris though forced for some time to take secondary place quantitatively grenoble never yielded to her rivals in the matter of quality if she could not produce the most gloves she at least would furnish the market with the best gloves The finest torred skins to be had were prepared for the Grenoble Glovers in the mills at Milau and Annonay.

Their value excelled that of any skins torred by foreigners.

On this fact, however, the prestige of the Grenoble Glove did not rest.

It must recognise the spirit of the times, and in the cause of social equality, it must furnish those who could not, or would not, buy expensive kid gloves with an excellent substitute as far as style and finish were concerned.

Lambskins at this period became the glove of democracy, and Villot, quickly overtaking her foreign competitors, is today producing fine lambskin gloves, which are second to none in Europe.

But to return to Annonay, whose name is identified with the ancient art of toying as far back probably as the 14th century.

The place has been called, and not inappropriately, the Twin City of Grenoble.

But there is a whole different chapter, 120 years earlier, and it starts not with an engineer or a mechanic but with two papermakers staring into a fireplace in southern France.

Joseph Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier were brothers from Annonay, a small town in the Ardèche region.

Their family made paper.

Good paper by all accounts.

The results kept confirming the idea.

By June of 1783, they were ready to go public.

In the town square at Annonay on June 4th, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated an unmanned balloon roughly thirty-five feet in diameter.

They burned a mixture of straw and wool underneath it, a deliberately smelly fuel they believed produced a special lifting gas.

In 1782, Cavallo succeeded in sending up a soap bubble filled with such gas.

It was in the same year that the Montgolfier brothers of Annonay, near Lyon in France, conceived the idea of using hot air for lifting things into the air.

They got this idea from watching the smoke curling up the chimney from the heat of the fire beneath.

In 1783, they constructed the first successful balloon of which we have any description.

We have a lot of French equipment here.

So a lot of it comes out of Annonay, France, which has a history of some really heavy duty precision equipment manufacturing.

And so our splitting machines, we have more modern ones now, but we still have one back from the 60s.

that my grandfather installed that came out of Anne and A. France.

In seventeen eighty-two, Cavallo succeeded in sending up a soap bubble filled with such gas.

It was in the same year that the Montgolfier brothers of Annonay, near Lyon in France, conceived the idea of using hot air for lifting things into the air.

They got this idea from watching the smoke curling up the chimney from the heat of the fire beneath.

In seventeen eighty-three, they constructed the first successful balloon of which we have any description.