Balloons

BALLOONS

BALLOONS. The advent and use of balloons spans the history of the United States and has made substantial contributions to science, military technology, and entertainment.

The notion of ballooning gained acceptance in the seventeenth century, but it was not until the late eighteenth century that the first designs were successfully tested. In France in 1783 the Robert brothers built the first hydrogen balloon, designed by Jacques Charles. Later in the year, the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated their own designs, one of which lifted two noblemen, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François d'Arlandes, on the first human flight.

News of such experiments reached the United States, and several projects were tested in Philadelphia. One of these projects, that of Peter Carnes, was a tethered balloon that successfully lifted thirteen-year-old Edward Warren in Baltimore on 24 June 1784. The experiment also suggests that Carnes had successfully solved most of the problems associated with early ballooning without access to information about the French designs. But it was not until January 1793 that an American untethered manned balloon flight took place, when the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard traveled from Philadelphia to Gloucester County, New Jersey.

During the Civil War both the Union and the Confederacy made use of ballooning for observation purposes. In the North, Thaddeus Lowe distinguished himself through his enthusiasm and his capacity for convincing authority figures, including President Lincoln, who authorized him to organize what Lowe would later call "the Aeronautic Corp." Lowe had seven balloons built (an-other three may have been added to the inventory later on) and enlisted the help of several fellow balloonists. His team provided valuable intelligence. Both the army and navy would make use of ballooning units until World War II.

Ballooning also found an application in the realm of science. In the late nineteenth century, atmospheric measurements were undertaken to further meteorological knowledge, and the practice was carried on through the use of unmanned sounding balloons.

In the twentieth century new balloon models set altitude records. Travel into the stratosphere was first achieved in 1931 by the Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard aboard a Belgian-funded balloon, and U.S. balloonists soon followed suit at the "Century of Progress" exhibit in Chicago in 1933. Two years later two army aeronauts aboard Explorer II, a helium-filled balloon, set an altitude record by reaching 72,395 feet and sent radio broadcasts from their pressurized gondola. In 1962 high altitude ballooning enabled the highest parachute jump ever, from 113,739.9 feet. NASA was also involved in the use of high-altitude balloons. In 1966, for example, it worked with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories to launch a mylar crib balloon to an altitude of 139,800 feet before deflating it to test a parachute recovery for a possible landing on Mars.

By far the biggest application for balloons today is the recreational use of hot-air balloons. In the early twentieth century, aerial races such as the Gordon Bennett Cup captivated the general public, but the sport remained an expensive and dangerous undertaking. Tests of various plastics after World War II yielded promising results (partly because they are cheaper to produce and can be sealed easily), and in 1955 Ed Yost built a thirty-nine-foot-diameter polyethylene balloon in his backyard and added a multiple-burner propane heater to inflate it. In 1960 he completed the first successful modern hot-air balloon flight, ascending to 9,300 feet before landing three hours and fifteen minutes later. His design included a "rip panel" that allows quick deflation for rapid descent, first imagined in 1859 by John Wise. In the early 1950s Don Piccard, Robert McNair, and Peter Wood formed the Balloon Club of America, which became part of the new Balloon Federation of America in 1961. The largest balloon gathering is the annual World Hot Air Balloon Championship.

Though much more expensive, some helium balloons have been used for long-range flights. Several such flights have set new records and received wide publicity. Among them were the first Atlantic crossing, in 1978 aboard Double Eagle II ; the first Pacific crossing, in 1981 aboard Double Eagle V ; Joe Kittinger's solo transatlantic flight in 1984; and Steve Fossett's round-the-world flight in 2002.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, Munson. With Brass and Gas: An Illustrated and Embellished Chronicle of Ballooning in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon, 1967.

Crouch, Tom D. The Eagle Aloft: Two Centuries of the Balloon in America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.

Devorkin, David H. Race to the Stratosphere: Manned Scientific Ballooning in America. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989.

Jackson, Donald Dale. The Aeronauts. Alexandria, Va.: Time Life, 1980.

Guillaume de Syon