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The History of First Hot air balloon

Wed, 12 Jun 2008 05:46:00 GMT

posted by teentweensblog

A Kongming lantern, the oldest type of hot air balloon

This 1818 technical illustration shows early balloon designs.
A model of the Montgolfier brothers balloon at the London Science Museum

The hot air balloon is the oldest successful human-carrying flight technology. On November 21, 1783, in Paris, France, the first manned flight was made by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes in a hot air balloon created by the Montgolfier brothers.
A hot air balloon consists of a bag called the envelope that is capable of containing heated air. Suspended beneath is the gondola or wicker basket (in some long-distance or high-altitude balloons, a capsule) which carries the passengers and a source of heat. The heated air inside the envelope makes it buoyant since it has a lower density than the relatively cold air outside the envelope. Unlike gas balloons, the envelope does not have to be sealed at the bottom since the air near the bottom of the envelope is at the same pressure as the surrounding air. In today's sport balloons the envelope is generally made from nylon fabric and the mouth of the balloon (closest to the burner flame) is made from fire resistant material such as Nomex.
Recently, balloon envelopes have been made in all kinds of shapes, such as hot dogs, rocket ships, and the shapes of commercial products. Hot air balloons that can be propelled through the air rather than just being pushed along by the wind are known as airships or, more commonly, thermal airships.

Premodern and unmanned balloons
A Kongming lantern, the oldest type of hot air balloon. This 1818 technical illustration shows early balloon designs.Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220-280 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling. These lanterns are known as Kongming lanterns.
There is also some speculation that hot air balloons could have been used by people of the Nazca culture of Peru some 1500 years ago, as a tool for designing the famous Nazca ground figures and lines.
The first documented balloon flight in Europe was by the Portuguese priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão. On August 8, 1709, in Lisbon, Bartolomeu de Gusmão managed to lift a small balloon made of paper full of hot air about 4 meters in front of king John V and the Portuguese court.

First manned flight
A model of the Montgolfier brothers balloon at the London Science MuseumThe first clearly recorded instance of a balloon carrying passengers used hot air to generate buoyancy and was built by the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier in Annonay, France. These brothers came from a family of paper manufacturers and had noticed ash rising in paper fires. The Montgolfier brothers gave their first public demonstration of their invention on June 4, 1783. After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first tethered balloon flight with humans on board took place on October 19, 1783 with the scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the manufacture manager, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon and Giroud de Villette, at the Folie Titon in Paris. The first free flight with human passengers was on 21 November 1783.King Louis XVI had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first pilots, but de Rozier, along with Marquis Francois d'Arlandes, successfully petitioned for the honor.The first hot air balloons were essentially cloth bags (sometimes lined with paper) with a smoky fire built on a grill attached to the bottom. They were susceptible to catching fire, often upon landing, although this occurred infrequently.

Military use
History of military ballooningThe first military use of aircraft in Europe took place during the French Revolutionary Wars, when the French used a tethered hydrogen balloon to observe the movements of the Austrian army during the Battle of Fleurus (1794).
In 1811 Franz Leppich went to Napoleon and claimed that he could build a hot-air balloon that would enable the French to attack from the air. Napoleon then ordered that he be removed from French Territory. In 1812 he went to Moscow to Count Rostopchin with the same proposal. When the balloon was finally tried out, it failed to rise, and nothing more was seen of its inventor.
In Tolstoy's Novel, War and Peace Count Pyótr Kiríllovich Bezúkhov (Pierre) makes an excursion to see this balloon though he does not see it. Tolstoy also includes a letter from the sovereign Emperor Alexander I to Count Rostopchin concerning the balloon.
Hot air balloons were employed during the American Civil War. The military balloons used by the Union Army Balloon Corps under the command of Prof. Thaddeus S. C. Lowe were limp silk envelopes inflated with coal gas (town gas) or hydrogen.

Today
A pair of Hopper balloons.Modern hot air ballons, with an onboard heat source, were pioneered by Ed Yost beginning in the 1950s which resulted in his first successful flight on October 22, 1960. The first modern day hot air balloon to be built in the United Kingdom (UK) was the Bristol Belle in 1967. Today, hot air balloons are used primarily for recreation, and there are some 7,500 hot air balloons operating in the United States.
Hot air balloons are able to fly to extremely high altitudes. On November 26, 2005, Vijaypat Singhania set the world altitude record for highest hot air balloon flight, reaching 21,290 metres (69,849 feet). He took off from downtown Bombay, India and landed 240 kilometres (149 miles) south in Panchale.[16] The previous record of 19,811 m (64,997 ft) had been set by Per Lindstrand on June 6, 1988 in Plano, Texas. As with all registered aircraft, oxygen is needed for all crew and passengers for any flight that reaches and exceeds an altitude of 12,500 ft (3,810 m).
On January 15, 1991, the Virgin Pacific Flyer balloon completed the longest flight in a hot air balloon when Per Lindstrand (born in Sweden, but resident in the UK) and Richard Branson of the UK flew 7,671.91 km (4,767.10 mi) from Japan to Northern Canada. With a volume of 74 thousand cubic metres (2.6 million cubic feet), the balloon envelope was the largest ever built for a hot air craft. Designed to fly in the trans-oceanic jet streams the Pacific Flyer recorded the highest ground speed for a manned balloon at 245 mph (394 km/h).
The longest duration hot air balloon flight ever made is 50 hours and 38 minutes made by Michio Kanda and Hirosuke Tekezawa of Japan on January 2, 1997.Source

Hot Air Balloons in the Classroom

Sun, 12 May 2008 09:07:48 GMT

posted by rhaden

With just a few weeks left of school, most of us aren't going to be redecorating the classroom. If you took everything down for testing, though, you might want a quick end of the year theme for a bulletin board just so you don't have to put it all back up again.

How about hot air balloons?

This is one of the happiest themes, but it can also be one of the most frustrating, because there are very few ready-made resources for it.

Here's one: Eureka's "The Sky is Your Limit" banner.

CTP has done cutouts with this theme. Since they use the popular Stick Kids, they give Stick Kids fans a chance to refresh their whole room with one change.

Put the banner along the side of your bulletin board and fill the rest with the cutouts, adding a student name to each one. Have each student write a goal for the rest of the year, a plan for the summer, or hopes for the next school year on a word card and attach the cards to the baskets for an uplifting bulletin board.

If you like this idea but prefer to do it without the banner, here are some bulletin board sayings you could use:

Rising to New Heights
Here We Soar
Flying High
Soaring Above the Crowd
Up, Up, and Away

Here's some more hot air balloon fun:

Read basic facts on balloon flight.
Make a Hot air balloon piñata.
Use a balloon-themed worksheet for preschool shapes practice.
Try an ESL lesson using this theme.
Check out a simple yet exciting science experiment. This is a video showing an experiment with a tea bag and matches
Make your own hot air balloon. Really!

Up and away in my beautiful 150 balloons

Sun, 7 Jul 2008 15:40:07 GMT

posted by milacurt

To the glorious roll call of aerial pioneers, daring aviators and magnificent men in flying machines can be added a new name. Kent Couch, a 48-year-old owner of a petrol station, yesterday succeeded in his third attempt to conquer the skies of northwest America, flying more than 230 miles in a garden chair supported by more than 150 helium-filled party balloons.

Equipped with a GPS device, an altimeter and a strong mug of coffee, Couch rose into the air from his hometown of Bend, Oregon, and wafted eastacross high deserts and into Idaho, where he landed in a field near the town of Cambridge.

Take-off was effected by dumping some of the 45 gallons of cherry Kool-Aid he carried as ballast, while to control his altitude Couch punctured some of his balloons with a ball-bearing gun and a blowpipe equipped with steel darts. "I'd go to 30,000 feet if I didn't shoot a balloon down periodically," he said.

"If I had the time and money and people, I'd do this every weekend," he said getting into the chair. "Things just look different from up there. The best thing is the peace, the serenity." It was his third flight. In 2006, he had to parachute after popping too many balloons; last year he flew 193 miles to the sagebrush of northeastern Oregon, but still short of his goal.

He had been inspired by the 1982 lawn chair flight over Los Angeles by Larry Walters, who gained folk hero fame but was fined $1,500 for violating air traffic rules.

Other DIY balloonists have been less fortunate. This weekend, sailors off Brazil discovered a body,all that remained of an attempt to set a record using helium party balloons. Catholic priest Father Adelir de Carli, 42, soared into the sky in April - and met unexpected winds , and was last seen out over the Atlantic.

Hot Air Balloon Season

Sun, 5 May 2008 16:12:00 GMT

posted by sandralee

Just when I was getting a good grip on double latte, I looked outside and saw that the hot air balloons are flying again. Silent bubbles of hot air floating across the blue blue sky. I'm not sure what hot air balloons have to do with wine, but they both seem to flourish in Napa Valley.

Orlando Hot Air Balloon Rides

Sat, 1 Jun 2008 13:57:00 GMT

posted by oe

Have you ever wanted to take a Hot Air Balloon Ride? The feeling of flying over the treetops, sometimes so close you could reach out and touch them. We finally did it! What a joy to see a raccoon washing his fish at the edge of a lake before he eats it and on the other side of the lake is a man fishing alone early in the morning. That is what it is all about!
We were picked up at the Galleria Palms Orlando by a van and shuttled to the site where the balloons were staged to go up into the sky. Everyone pitched in to spread out the balloons so they could fill with the hot air. We climbed into a basket and started to ascend! There were 3 balloons aloft that day with about 38 total passengers and 3 pilots.
All the pilots were certified and licensed which made the trip very safe for all of us.
So many memorable things happened that day: Luke Foster proposed to Nicola Shannon while flying high up in the sky. They were both from Essex, England. A young couple getting married that day started their wedding day by experiencing a balloon ride, We made new friends with people from all over the world and we all shared the same awe inspiring serene feeling.
We were in the air about an hour to an hour and a half when we started to descend into a farmers’ field where the vans found us, fed us champagne toasts and orange juice and brought us back to a lovely breakfast. This is an experience not to be missed when in Orlando! You even receive a flight certificate as a souvenir!
Check out the pictures…..then book the package on Galleria Palms Orlando