Eighteenth Century Ballooning :: European Europe History

Eighteenth Century Ballooning In a sentence 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 go flight that ballooning was actually and accidental disc everyplacey. The shift to alternate opportunities to fly occurred in 1766 with the discovery of hydrogen. Henry Cavendish discovered the gas he coined the inflammable gas. At that time this meant that the gas was highly combustible, unlike todays interpretation of inflammable. What made this gas so important was the fact that the gas was much transport 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 Priestlys publication of Experiments a nd Observations with Different Types of Air. This paper explored uses of the gas and nurture 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 make full 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 pasture 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 plain be better contained in the balloon. Some individuals even believe that the brothers used thick smoke to conceal their ideas.