Thursday, October 24, 2019
Eighteenth Century Ballooning :: European Europe History
Eighteenth Century Ballooning   In a time where the skies are full of aircraft, it is hard to  imagine a time when air travel was nothing but a dream. That was  just the case during the early eighteenth century. The dream of flight  was so concentrated on winged flight that ballooning was actually and  accidental discovery. The shift to alternate opportunities to fly  occurred in 1766 with the discovery of hydrogen. Henry Cavendish  discovered the gas he coined the â€Å"inflammable gas.†At that time this  meant that the gas was highly combustible, unlike today’s  interpretation of inflammable. What made this gas so important was  the fact that the gas was much lighter than the atmosphere. The  lighter gas would give the balloon lift in the surrounding atmosphere,  hopefully taking a human along with it. The new discovery brought a  lot of excitement to the pursuit of air travel. The discovery began to  move forward in 1774 with Joseph Priestly’s publication of  â€Å"Experiments and Observations with Different Types of Air.†This  paper explored uses of the gas and further explained its properties for  future experimentation. In 1777, the paper was translated into  French and read by Joseph Montgolfier. The paper inspired  Montgolfier to further explore the possibilities of the gas. Montgolfier  and his brother Etienne began experimenting with the gas in hopes of  coming up with a device to give them flight. This became a reality in  1786 when the two brothers were able to fly small cloth and paper hot  air filled balloons. This was the small and modest beginning to hot air  balloon flight.  The brothers had some complication to work out with the first  flights being experimental. They used dense smoke from burning  chopped wool or damp straw to lift the balloon. The smoke idea most  likely came from a concept left over from the medieval times. They  believed that smoke had more of a virtue of lightness, and lighter  meant that the balloon had a better chance of flight. Another  possibility is that the brothers believed that the dense smoke would  simply be better contained in the balloon. Some individuals even  believe that the brothers used thick smoke to conceal their ideas.
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