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Montgolfier brothers

Ballooning history

Ballooning history

( continuation of previous post from March 10th 2016)
It took more than 70 years for the next step to be taken, this time by the Montgolfier brothers specifically Josep- Michel and Jaques-Étienne Motngolfier who made their other nine brothers famous by transforming an ordinary activity such as drying laundry in the ancestor of the modern hot air balloons
Sons of a paper manufacturer, as they watched laundry drying over a hot fire, they noticed that the fire caused the laundry to float upwards. They repeated their experiment with paper bags, and searching for lighter materials, conducted their first experiments with linen and silk in 1782. On December 14th 1782, they succeeded in an outdoor launch of an 18 m³ silk bag. Their first public demonstration was held on June 4th 1783 where they launched an 800 m³ paper sphere with a weight of 225 kg, filled with hot air, its flight lasted 10 minutes, covered 2km to an altitude of between 1600 and 2000 meters. Since the affects of the air at higher altitudes were unknown at that moment, in October 1783, they sent up a sheep, a roaster and a duck, and gave them the privilege or of being the first passengers of a hot air balloon, something that they would have declined, if they could have. This first historical flight was conducted in Versailles in order to be granted permission from King Louis XVI of France, for a trial human flight.

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, from France as well, but this time a physics and chemistry teacher and inventor, witnessed the montgolfier´s first flight, and also collaborated on the animal manned flight. After doing some tests on November 21st 1783 Pilâtre de Rozier and Marquis d’Arlandes conducted made the first free flight by humans. They flew aloft for about 30 minutes over Château de la Muette, Paris, for a distance of thirteen kilometers at an altitude of approximately 900 meters
Hot air balloons were then named Montgolfier or montgolfiera. Joseph Montgolfier, Pilâtre de Rozier, and other another four adventurers, stared the second manned flight on January 19th 1784 on a 13,000 m³, for a short distance.

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