Balloon Animals

Balloon Animals

Posted: October 23, 2014

Evan Hadingham: It’s one of humanity’s oldest dreams: to leave the surface of the Earth far behind and to soar into the clouds like a bird. It took many centuries to realize that dream, of course, and there were many milestones along the way—the Wright brothers’ flight, the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. But the date I’m thinking of was a couple of centuries ago—November the 21st, 1783. That was the date of the world’s first voyage in a hot air balloon that carried human beings aloft.

The hot air balloon was invented by two French brothers, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, who ran a highly successful paper-making business. And the story goes that Joseph got the idea one evening when he was watching his wife’s laundry— specifically, his wife’s blouse billowing in the hot air rising from the fireplace.

The Montgolfiers’ first experiments involved little paper bags with candles suspended underneath that they launched from their porch at night. They experimented with bigger and bigger balloons, until finally they made one out of paper and canvas that was seven stories high and fully capable of lifting a human being.

There was just one complication. By this time, their flights had created such a sensation in France that their base of operations had been moved to the palace of Versailles under the watchful eye of Louis XVI himself, who was reluctant to have human beings risk their lives. So the king decreed there had to be a guinea pig, or rather a rooster, a sheep, and a duck all crammed into a wicker cage slung underneath the balloon. It seems that even back then passenger legroom was an issue.

Now the curious thing about the Montgolfiers is that although they built increasingly successful hot air balloons, they had no real idea at all of why their balloons worked. Now, a hot air balloon rises because hot air is less dense than the surrounding air and so it carries the balloon upwards.

But the Montgolfiers didn’t realize that. They thought that the smoke from the fire burning underneath the balloon was a special lifting gas…and that the smokier the fire, the more powerfully the balloon would rise into the sky. So it’s said they they shoveled all kinds of things into the fire to make more smoke, such as wool, old shoes, even decomposing meat. As the balloon got ready to lift off, the stench was so overpowering that it’s said that King Louis and Marie Antoinette fled the scene in disgust.

But the story has a happy ending. The plucky animals, after an eight-minute two-mile flight, landed safely and scampered out of their cage, unscathed. The first human balloon flights would soon follow.

For more about those pioneering flights, fed by a power source even smellier than rocket fuel, be sure to tune into NOVA’s “Ben Franklin’s Balloons.”

So Kieran, did you ever hear the one about the sheep, the rooster, and the duck?

Kieran McWilliam: No, Evan. But go clean up your mess!

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Produced by

Ari Daniel
Elizabeth Gillis

Production Assistance

Kristen Clark
Bridget Reed Morawski

Original Footage

© WGBH Educational Foundation 2014

MEDIA CREDITS

Starring

Evan Hadingham
Kieran McWilliam

Wright Brothers' plane

NASA (Public Domain)

Moon footprint

NASA (Public Domain)

Versailles

Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

Louis XVI

Wikimedia Commons/Callet (Public Domain)

Additional video footage

NOVA's Ben Franklin's Balloons

Music

Free Music Archive/Soni Ventorum Wind Quartet (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Hornpipe by Paul Mottram

Special Thanks

Irish Village in Brighton, MA

IMAGE

(main image: Evan and Kieran at bar)

© WGBH Educational Foundation 2014