The history of ballooning, both with hot air and gas, spans many centuries. It includes many firsts, including the first human flight, first flight across the English Channel, first flight in North America, and first aircraft related disaster.
Premodern and unmanned balloons
Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (c. AD 220–280) used airborne lanterns for military signaling. These lanterns are known as Chinese lanterns or Kongming lanterns (孔明灯). While there is no direct documentary or archaeological evidence of any manned or unmanned flights prior to those discussed below occurred using these methods, Ege notes an indirect report of evidence that the Chinese "solved the problem of aerial navigation" using balloons, hundreds of years before the 18th century. The Mongolian army studied Kongming lanterns from China and used them in the Battle of Legnica during the Mongol invasion of Poland. This is the first time ballooning was known in the western world.
The first documented balloon flight in Europe was by the Brazilian-Portuguese priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão. On 8 August 1709, in Lisbon, Bartolomeu de Gusmão managed to lift a small balloon made of paper full of hot air about four meters in front of king John V and the Portuguese court. He also claimed to have built a balloon named Passarola (Big bird) and attempted to lift himself from Saint George Castle in Lisbon, landing about one kilometre away. However the claim of this feat remains uncertain, even though there is record of this flight in the source used by the FAI (World Air Sports Federation) the exact distance and conditions of the flight are not confirmed.
First hydrogen balloon Following the publication of Robert Boyle's Law in 1662, and Henry Cavendish's 1766 work on hydrogen, Joseph Black proposed that if the gaseous element filled a balloon, the inflated object could rise up into the air. Jacques Charles, whose study of gases led to his namesake law of volumes, had studied the works of Cavendish, Black, and Tiberius Cavallo, and also thought that hydrogen could lift a balloon. Jacques Charles designed the balloon, and the Robert brothers constructed a lightweight, airtight gas bag. Barthélémy Faujas de Saint-Fond organized a crowd-funded subscription to finance the brothers' project. The Roberts dissolved rubber in a solution of turpentine, with which they varnished stitched-together sheets of silk, to make the main envelope. They used alternating strips of red and white silk, but the rubberising varnish yellowed the white silk.
Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers began filling the world's first hydrogen balloon on 23 August 1783, in the Place des Victoires, Paris. The balloon was comparatively small, a 35-cubic-metre sphere of rubberised silk (about 13 feet in diameter), and only capable of lifting about 9 kg. It was filled with hydrogen that had been made by pouring nearly a quarter of a tonne of sulphuric acid onto half a tonne of scrap iron. The hydrogen gas was fed into the envelope via lead pipes; as it was not passed through cold water, the gas was hot when produced, and then contracted as it cooled in the balloon, causing great difficulty in filling the balloon completely. Daily progress bulletins were issued on the inflation, attracting a crowd that became so great that on the 26th the balloon was moved secretly by night to the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower), a distance of 4 kilometres. On 27 August 1783, the balloon was released; Benjamin Franklin was among the crowd of onlookers. The balloon flew northwards for 45 minutes, pursued by chasers on horseback, and landed 21 kilometres away in the village of Gonesse, where the reportedly terrified local peasants attacked it with pitchforks and knives, and destroyed it.
First unmanned flight On 5 June 1783, the Montgolfier brothers first publicly demonstrated an unmanned hot-air balloon 35 feet (11 m) in diameter. On 19 September 1783, their balloon Aerostat Réveillon was flown with the first (non-human) living creatures in a basket attached to the balloon: a sheep called Montauciel ("Climb-to-the-sky"), a duck and a rooster. The sheep was believed to have a reasonable approximation of human physiology. The duck was expected to be unharmed by being lifted aloft. It was included as a control for effects created by the aircraft rather than the altitude. The rooster was included as a further control as it was a bird that did not fly at high altitudes. This demonstration was performed before a crowd at the royal palace in Versailles, before King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. The flight lasted approximately eight minutes, covered two miles (3 km), and obtained an altitude of about 1,500 feet (460 m). The craft landed safely after flying.
First manned flight
The first clearly recorded instance of a balloon carrying human passengers used hot air to generate buoyancy and was built by the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier in Annonay, France. These brothers came from a family of paper manufacturers and had noticed ash rising in paper fires. The Montgolfier brothers gave their first public demonstration of their invention on 4 June 1783. After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first manned balloon flight took place on 15 October 1783, from the Folie Titon in Paris, piloted by the scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier with the balloon tethered. The balloon reached a height of 84 feet (approximately 25 metres), the maximum height allowed by the tethering ropes, and stayed aloft for 4 minutes and 25 seconds. Further tethered test flights were carried out on 19 October 1783 with passengers including Giroud de Villette, and the Marquis François d'Arlandes separately accompanying de Rozier.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
