First Hot Air Balloon

• Author: admin
• Filed under: What is ?
• Date: Jun 4,2008

The hot air balloon is the oldest successful human-carrying flight technology, dating back to its invention by the Montgolfier brothers in Annonay, France in 1783. The first hot air balloon flight carrying humans was made in one of their balloons on November 21, 1783, in Paris by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes.
The first clearly recorded instances of hot air balloons capable of carrying passengers used hot air to obtain buoyancy and were 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 the ash rising in fires. After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first balloon flight with humans on board took place on October 19, 1783 with the scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the manufacture manager, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon and Giroud de Villette, at the Folie Titon in Paris. Officially, the first hot air balloon flight was 1 month later, 21 November 1783. King Louis XVI had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first pilots, but a young physicist named Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis Francois d’Arlandes successfully petitioned for the honor. The first hot air balloons were basically cloth bags (sometimes lined with paper) with a smoky fire built on a grill attached to the bottom. They had a tendency to catch fire and be destroyed upon landing, although this was infrequent.
Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era, used airborne lanterns for military signaling. These lanterns are known as Kongming lanterns (孔明灯).

There is also some speculation that hot air balloons could have been used by the Nazca culture of Peru some 1500 years ago, as a tool for designing the famous Nazca ground figures and lines.

In 1978, the Double Eagle II became the first hot air balloon to cross the Atlantic, another major benchmark in the History of Ballooning. After many unsuccessful attempts this mighty Ocean had finally been cracked. It was a helium filled model, carrying 3 passengers, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman. They set a new flight duration time at 137 hours.

It’s interesting to see how the development of the the hot air balloon has gone full circle on itself. At the very start, the first balloonists burnt materials onboard the balloon to generate heat to propel the envelope into the air. This theory then became obsolete as gas and helium designs were introduced as it was considered safer and more reliable than flying with an open flame. It is only within the last 50 or so years that hot air balloons have come back into interest.

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