File:Pauli's first airship (Paris, 1804).jpg

English: Pauly 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. As Pauly told the readers of the Journal de Paris the next day, it sailed from the Tivoli Park in a moderate easterly wind at the speed of a galloping horse to the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Concorde, where the aeronaut operated his aerial rudder and managed, according to his own words, five or six minutes against the wind to stay in place and to enjoy the thunderous applause of the onlookers. (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.)