■ Balloons

To fly has been a dream, although an elusive dream, of humankind from time immemorial. Through the ages, mockingly the birds of the air swirled and swooped with graceful ease over earthbound man. Man continued to look to the sky, and to dream on. The first flights of man were not to be patterned after the winged crea­tures; that had proven over the millennia to be too complex. Man’s first exploration aloft was the result of the observations of two wealthy French brothers, Jacques-Etienne and Joseph – Michel Montgolfier, who happened to be paper – makers in Annonay, France. They observed that fire seemed to have the quality of supporting certain light solid objects, like paper, and that they were borne aloft on what they theorized was a lighter than air gas. Experimentation led to the first hot air balloon ascent in 1783. This was followed that same year by a successful two-hour flight of a balloon filled with hydrogen gas, the brainchild of a French chemist, Jacques- Alexandre-Cesar Charles. Hydrogen gas had been first isolated in 1766 by the British chemist Henry Cavendish. The first ascent by humans in a balloon was also recorded in 1783 near Paris, piloted by Jean-Francois de Rozier.

Within two years, there were people who called themselves “aeronauts,” and who devoted significant effort to getting off the ground and going somewhere. In 1785, aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard, accompanied by an American, John

Jeffries, made the first successful crossing of the English Channel from Dover to Calais.

Balloons immediately found a use as obser­vation platforms during the French Revolu­tion and, later, during the American Civil War. (See Figure 5-1.) War again provided func­tion to the balloons in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) as observation vehicles, and even as an escape vehicle when French minister Leon Gambetta floated out of the besieged city of Paris to the very great consternation of the opposing forces. Progressing from war to war, it seems, once again balloons were used for observation in World War I, but now they were joined by, and opposed by, fighter aircraft.

Until the modern age, the record for dis­tance traveled in piloted balloons stood from 1914, when the balloon Berliner covered a dis­tance of 1,896 miles from Bitterfeld, Germany to

Perm, Russia. Toward the middle and latter 20th century, extraordinary feats have accompanied balloon flight. In 1960, Capt. Joe Kittinger of the U. S. Air Force ascended in a polyethylene balloon to an altitude of 102,800 feet, setting an altitude record. Fie then bailed out of the gondola to set a free-fall parachute descent record for the time. The balloon altitude record was broken the next year during an ascent to 113,700 feet. In 1984, Kittinger piloted a 3,000 cubic meter bal­loon from Caribou, Maine to Cairo Montenotte, Italy, covering 3,543 miles. He thus became the first, and only, person to solo a balloon across the Atlantic Ocean. Kittenger’s free-fall para­chute jump record stood for over 50 years until broken by the Austrian, Felix Baumgartner, on October 12, 2012. Although the Kittinger ascent and jump was a government project (United States Air Force), the Baumgarnter adventure was funded by the Austrian company Red Bull GmbH, which produces the eponymous energy drink, Red Bull; Kissinger served as technical advisor on the project. Baumgartner also became the first man to break the sound barrier without an airplane, reaching an unofficial speed of mach 1.24 in freefall.