History of hot air balloons
The discovery that hot air rises was made by the broth French paper industrialists. This led to the Hot Air Balloon being invented. A Hot Air Balloon is a type of aircraft that becomes airborne because of the buoyancy, or lift, supplied by a gas that is less dense than the air surrounding the balloon. The Hot Air Balloon is based on the Archimedes Principle. The Archimedes Principle is that the buoyant force of a liquid is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object. Balloons were used in the first successful human attempts at flying. In 1783 Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier at Annonay, France, confirmed that a fabric bag filled with hot air would rise. On June Fourth of that same year, they launched an unmanned balloon that traveled more than 1.5 miles. They repeated this experiment using a larger balloon on September 19, 1783, sending a sheep, a rooster, and a duck aloft.
The first manned flight in a balloon, took place on November 21, 1783. This is when Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent, Marquis d'Arlandes, sailed over the city of Paris in a Montgolfier Balloon. They burned wool and straw to keep the air in the balloon hot. Their flight covered 5.5 miles in about twenty-three minutes. In December of that year, the physicist J.A.C. Charles, accompanied by Nicholas-Louis Robert, flew a balloon filled with hydrogen on a two hour flight.
Balloons were soon used for military services. They were used as observation sites in the Civil War, and in World War One. When the discovery of the airplane came along, there was no longer a need for the balloon in the military.
Balloons have also proven to be enormously valuable to science. They have been used to improve weather predictions and observations. Auguste Piccard, Swiss physicist and educator, set a world's altitude record in May 1931 in a balloon of his own design, which featured the first pressurized cabin used in flight.
Joseph Montgolfier, the man who invented the first hot air balloon.