He gave his name to a street in Paris… but his fate was decided more than 8,000 meters above the ground.
Joseph Crocé-Spinelli was not a 20th-century aviator, but a French aeronaut born in 1845. On April 15, 1875, he took off from the La Villette gasworks aboard the balloon Le Zénith, alongside Théodore Sivel and Gaston Tissandier, on a scientific mission to explore the upper layers of the atmosphere.
The balloon kept climbing… 6,000 meters, 7,000, then more than 8,000 meters. But up there, the air was running out. At around 8,600 meters, the experiment turned into tragedy: Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel died of asphyxiation. Only Gaston Tissandier survived.
Today, his name still lives on in Paris, as a reminder of a pioneer who gave his life to the exploration of the skies.
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