Balloon Mania!

A rooster, a duck, and a sheep walk into a hot-air balloon (it really happened!)... in this episode, you'll learn about the early days of ballooning, parachuting, and the mania that ensued!

Transcript

Welcome to I Got Stuck! A catalog of temporary obsessions, with me, your host, Dr. Kelly Reidy, wherein each week, I’ll give you a full report on the latest topic that’s kept me up at night. Things that have let to countless hours of procrastination through googling, asking Jeeves, and navigating the twistiest and turniest of internet rabbit holes. By the way, don’t feed carrots to rabbits! It gives ‘em tummy aches!

This is the  story of Balloon Mania, or the history of ballooning and, by association, parachuting! And the first thing you need to know is that I have never been in a hot air balloon. I have never even considered being in hot air balloon. Same goes for anything related to a parachute. So everything I’m going to tell you about today, I’m doing it through a veil of what I think is very healthy fear.

So here I go - I’m gonna be brave and tell you everything I know:

The story of Balloon Mania starts with the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Etienne. And if you think they were professional aviation specialists, you are wrong. The Montgolfier brothers were paper-manufacturers. Until one fateful day, when one of the brothers (Joseph) was literally sitting around watching his laundry dry. And in his case, this meant staring at damp fabric that was suspended above an open flame. 

Joseph noticed all of a sudden that the fire was causing pockets of air in the fabric, which pushed it up. Joseph was no scientist and had no idea what was going on, but he thought it was gonna be a really big deal nonetheless! So, he guessed. And his guess was that the there must be some extra type of gas involved in the release of smoke from the fire. And then, he named this special new type of gas after himself: Montgolfier gas! Which you likely haven’t heard of, because it’s not real. But this behavior that he observed that he hadn’t previously known about led him to make the first successful hot air balloon with his brother.

Scientists had been researching flotation for a while, and they understood that the key to flotation is density. Air molecules have a particular density, and for something to float upwards in air, it needs to be less dense than that air itself. And of course, generally speaking, the density of air goes down as the air heats up. Hot air is less dense than cooler air, which is why we say “hot air rises.” It's all a matter of density.

So, Joseph Montgolfier noticed this effect of the hot air pushing the fabric up, AND supposedly he was also kinda daydreaming about war and gazing at a painting of Gibraltar that hung over his fireplace.

A notorious problem of the time was nobody could attack Gibraltar because it was just too dang hard to get to - people couldn’t get to it by land OR by sea. So Montgolfier thought hey what if we make a big version of this and use it to attack Gibraltar?! And he and his brother Etienne got to work! They made a bunch of small prototypes, then when they felt pretty confident about their little ones, they started to make bigger ones. 

I will say that there are a LOT of different versions of this story and a lot of different sets of details about this story that I found in my research. But the gist of it is the same in all of them. 

In the summer of 1783, they decided to do a public demonstration in their town of Annonay (southeast of France). They had built a big balloon out of silk and lined it with paper. It was… BIG. The diameter was 33 feet. They filled that with heated air by burning wool, damp straw, and old shoes under the opening of the balloon. And that’s kind of an interesting thing - they didn’t understand the physics behind it, that hot air rises and all they really needed was hot air. At this point, they still believed that they had produced a new substance (remember they called it Montgolfier Gas?) and, this is even weirder, they also believed that the densest, thickest possible smoke worked best. Hence the burning of wool, straw, and old shoes instead of something normal like wood.

So the made their old shoe fire, launched the balloon, and it flew for about ten minutes and traveled a little more than a mile! Not bad! There was nobody in it, but still. A pretty big accomplishment!

But the obvious problem is that in order to keep a hot air balloon in the air, the air has to stay hot. And that wasn’t easy with the Montgolfier system. They’d have to attach a constant fuel source (that’s a lot of wool and old shoes to bring along and it would be really heavy), and then starting a fire like that under a silk and paper balloon was of course pretty risky in terms of the whole thing maybe catching on fire.

One other option was to use a lighter element like hydrogen. If you fill up a balloon with hydrogen gas, it floats in air, because it’s less dense than air. The Montgolfier Brothers had done some experiments with hydrogen, but they couldn’t figure out how to contain the gas, so they ended up with their hot dense smoke system. Old shoes.

And then right around that time, a French physicist named Jacques Charles solved the problem of how to contain the hydrogen. Instead of a paper and silk balloon like the Montgolfiers had made, Charles used rubber-coated silk to trap the hydrogen!

In August (so just two months after the Montgolfiers’ initial balloon flight), Jacques Charles did his first demonstration flight, and his balloon flew a whopping *15* miles! Recall that the Montgolfier’s first attempt had travel a little over one mile. So this hydrogen balloon went 15 miles, and it landed in a village outside of town, where it was promptly destroyed by terrified villagers with pitchfork who hadn’t heard about the launch and thought it was a monster!

But in Paris, Balloon flight was all anybody was talking about! A French newspaper declared it to be “balloon mania”! Tens of thousands of people attended the balloon launch experiences, even hundreds of thousands in a couple of cases. People were putting balloon images on everything - wallpaper, jewelry, clocks, furniture, clothing, and it even inspired some hairstyles and fashion choices. 

Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend "All conversation here at present turns upon the Balloons…and the means of managing them so as to give Men the Advantage of Flying.” And other guy said “Among all our circle of friends, at all our meals, in the antechambers of our lovely women, as in the academic schools, all one hears is talk of experiments, atmospheric air, inflammable gas, flying cars, journeys in the sky.”

And it must have been so exciting! One launch observer wrote “It is impossible to describe that moment: the women in tears, the common people raising their hands to the sky in deep silence; the passengers leaning out of the gallery, waving and crying out in joy… the feeling of fright gives way to wonder.” But on the flip side of that, people would start to RIOT if they got to a balloon demonstration and things were taking too long. It was truly a wild time.

Louis 16, who was king at the time, had to get in on the action. The main balloon dudes at the time were the Montgolfier Brothers and Jacques Charles (the hydrogen guy). The Montgolfier Brothers were invited to come do a big demonstration at Versailles for Louis 16 and Marie Antoinette and whoever else showed up. This was a pretty big gig, and the competition and the mania were really heating up so the brothers very wisely decided they better get an expert involved this time. 

They got in touch with a friend of theirs, a man named Jean-Baptiste Réveillon. And he was… what? A scientist? An engineer? Nope, he was… a wallpaper designer. And he designed a fancy wallpaper cover for the balloon that had a lot of stuff on it they thought King Louis would like. Very important. And so, with their fancy wallpaper balloon, they traveled to Versailles on September 19, 1783, for the demonstration. Around 130,000 people showed up to watch! There had been an advance communication in which Louis suggested they put some people on it to see what happens to them; Louis specifically is said to have suggested prisoners. Most versions of the story say that the brothers were like "ehhhhh maybe let’s not do that, though.” Instead, the first passengers were a duck, a sheep, and a rooster. The logic behind that was: the rooster was used as a control since it could fly and probably wouldn’t get hurt, a duck was used because it can fly, but doesn’t usually at high altitudes, and the sheep? It was apparently picked because of its similarity to humans. 

The balloon, with its three passengers, was launched and it flew for about 8 minutes and traveled about 2 miles! And I know that right now in this moment some of you don’t care because you’re still worried about the rooster, the duck, and the sheep. Well, luckily, I have good news - they survived and were called “heroes” by the press! The official quote that got printed in the news was “It was judged that they had not suffered, but they were, to say the least, much astonished.” Now that we know the animals travelled safely and had their minds blown, I’ll tell you again that the balloon flew for 8 minutes and traveled for around 2 miles! That’s no 15 miles, but it’s better that the Brothers’ first test that only flew for about a mile.

And then fast forward to a couple months later in November: the Montgolfier Brothers were finally ready to try it out with people, again for a big demonstration. The lucky fellas were: Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, who was a physics teacher, and the Marquis d’Arlandes, who was a military officer. They flew 6 miles in around 25 minutes! Getting better every time!

At this demonstration, Benjamin Franklin was in the crowd. He wrote in his journal: “We observed [the balloon] lift off in the most majestic manner. When it reached around 250 feet in altitude, the intrepid voyagers lowered their hats to salute the spectators. We could not help feeling a certain mixture of awe and admiration.” 

After that first manned flight, de Rozier, who was the physics teacher who flew in the balloon, decided to do some experiments on his own. He designed his own new type of balloon - his was a combo of the two types I’ve told you about. It used both hot air and hydrogen. If you’re thinking that’s a potentially extremely bad combination, you’re right. He had them in separate chambers, but they must not have been well-sealed or something. Because in 1785, when he tried to cross the English channel in one of his hot air hydrogen balloons, the balloon basically exploded. It caught on fire, it deflated, and it crashed. But he was the first person in the world to die in an air crash, so that’s something!

On that note: during balloon mania, there was another innovation race going on - people, and balloonists in particular, were trying to figure out the parachute.

The idea of a parachute goes back to at least the middle ages, when a Spanish guy “jumped from a tower while wearing a large cloak.” Sounds a little cartoonish - he was trying to fly by wearing a big coat and failed, but he actually survived! 

And then there were lots of other attempts at similar things with similar designs, including by Leonardo da Vinci.

But let’s skip ahead to 1783. The height of balloon mania. Eyes on the prize. In 1783, the first recorded public parachute jump was done by a Frenchman named Louis-Sébastien Lenormand. He actually wasn’t a balloonist, but a physicist and chemist. He just had really good timing. He started with another somewhat cartoonish setup - two umbrellas that had been rigged into a parachute setup, and for his first experiment with that, he jumped out of a tree. After more tests and experiments, he ended up with a more sophisticated working parachute that he used in his big public demonstration! This was in December 1783, and Joseph Montgolfier was there to watch the whole thing.

By the way, two years after that demonstration, Lenormand coined the term “parachute” - a combo of the Italian “para” (which means something like to resist) and the French “chute” (meaning “fall”). Totally literal.

And a semi-technical thing is that up to this point, the parachutes that existed were fixed-canopy style, meaning they were already open before the jump started. Essentially big cartoon umbrellas. 

And then, Andre-Jacques Garnerin got into the parachute game. He was a student of Jacques Charles, who made that hydrogen balloon that traveled 15 miles. He invented the “frameless parachute,” which is more like what you picture when you think of a parachute. He was primarily a balloonist, so all his demos and experiments involved balloons. Great for balloon mania. In his first public demonstration, he attached a silk parachute to the basket part of his balloon, and when he got up to around 3,000 feet, he cut the cord that connected the basket part to the balloon. So he and his basket were only attached to the parachute. Apparently the basket swung like crazy the whole way down, and he got the first recorded case of aviation motion sickness, but he was ok, and some people started using parachutes as safety devices in hot air balloons!

But that wasn’t the end of the story - Garnerin kept going and did more tests. In 1798, he even - brace yourselves - wanted to take a woman up in a balloon. This was a really big deal. The Police did not like the idea - their primary concern, so they said, was the effect of the air pressure on the “delicate organs” of a woman. But also they really didn’t like the idea of a man and a woman being alone together in a balloon. What if she passed out? They said. For example. The Police ultimate said no to the idea. But Garnerin was determined, and asked to speak to their managers. He took the request up a level in the police department, and he got their approval! The official statement was "there was no more scandal in seeing two people of different sexes ascend in a balloon than it is to see them jump into a carriage.” Ciyonenne Henri was chosen, the flight went swimmingly, and even though several other woman had been in balloons, Citoyenne Henri somehow got credited as “the first woman who ever had the courage to trust herself in the regions of air.”

Another amazing women in this balloon world was Jeanne Genevieve, who was Garnerin’s student and later his wife. She was the first woman to make a parachute descent from a balloon! And she did a lot of ballooning and parachuting with Garnerin, until 1823 when tragedy struck. He was building a new balloon, and was walking around the construction site when he got hit in the head with a falling construction beam. He died instantly. I forgot to mention this earlier, but he was, at some point during his career, appointed as the “Official Aeronaut of France.” Not too shabby of a title.

So while Garnerin’s invention of the frameless parachute was a great addition as a safety feature in ballooning, it clearly didn’t always help. Ballooning was still extremely dangerous. There’s the ground stuff, like what happened to Garnerin himself, but the air was still dangerous too. 

For example: Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who was a really famous balloonist, had a heart attack while he was up in the air in a balloon. That caused him to fall out of the balloon, and he died a year later because of the injuries from that fall. It was shocking and scary and extra-sad because he and his second wife were kind of a ballooning power couple (he abandoned his first wife for ballooning). But his second wife, Sophie Blanchard, was the first woman to work as a professional balloonist. 

She was a big deal in her own right. She was a favorite of Napoleon, and she was even given the title of “Official Aeronaut of the Restoration” by Louis the 18th.

When Jean-Pierre died, Sophie kept ballooning. She started doing night balloon flights and would stay in the air all night, alone. He had left behind a lot of debts that she had to pay off, so she started doing wilder and wilder balloon things for money. She made a trip across the Alps, she almost died after landing in a swamp in Italy, and she started shooting off fireworks under her balloon and dropping them via parachute.

Another money-saving strategy was that she switched to using a cheaper type of balloon. She switched from a hot-air balloon to a a hydrogen balloon with a teeny-tiny basket. So the materials were cheaper because it was smaller, and she didn’t have to keep a fire going. And I strongly encourage you to go look up a picture of this teeny-tiny basket she was in. It looks incredibly terrifying.

Nobody knows for sure what happened at her public demonstration on July 16, 1819, but it was Sophie’s final flight. People had warned her about how dangerous the fireworks/hydrogen combination was, and it seemed like she was finally starting to listen, because as she got into the balloon she said “Let’s go, this will be for the last time.” And she was right.

She lit fireworks and dropped them to the ground using little parachutes, as always, but something went wrong, and one of the fireworks went up instead of down. The whole ballon caught on fire. One observer wrote “it lighted up Paris like some immense moving beacon.” At first people thought it was part of the show and the crowd was going wild! Meanwhile, the burning balloon started to fall, but she was throwing out ballast to slow it down, and it looked like it was working! But then, a terrible thing happened - the basket crashed into a roof. Sophie tumbled out, fell off the roof down to the street, broke her neck, and died instantly. It was a horrible horrible event witnessed by thousands of people, and news spread fast. Sophie’s story was referenced in works by Jules Verne, by Dostoevsky, and by Charles Dickens, among others. And Sophie made history even in her death by becoming the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident. Quite a feat. Quite a person. Oh, and, supposedly the character of Amelia in the 2019 movie “The Aeronauts” was based on Sophie. And it has a 72% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I might actually be giving that a watch! 

And this is where I’ll leave you. I hope these inspiring and tragic and bizarre stories of balloon mania, lifted your spirits a little bit this week.

Until next time, stay curious, don’t forget to look up, and no open flames near hydrogen!