The king wanted convicts aboard the first free balloon flight
Louis XVI originally decreed that condemned criminals should be the first people to fly free beneath a Montgolfier balloon. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes lobbied for the honour instead, and on 21 November 1783 they drifted over Paris in the first untethered human flight.
The brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier first showed off their invention publicly at Annonay, then sent an unmanned balloon up for ten minutes on 19 September 1783. Animal passengers followed, and around 15 October Pilâtre de Rozier rose 26 metres on a tether from a workshop yard in Paris. Within eleven years the French army was using a balloon named l'Entreprenant to watch the enemy at Fleurus.
Earlier ideas foreshadowed it. Chinese sky lanterns were reportedly used for signalling in the Three Kingdoms era, and in 1709 the Jesuit Bartolomeu de Gusmão demonstrated an unmanned model before King John V of Portugal. In 1975 the balloonist Julian Nott built and flew a craft from materials he said ancient Peruvians could have used, arguing Nazca leaders might have directed the famous ground drawings from the air.
Physics does the lifting: air warmed by a propane burner is less dense than the cooler air around it. The envelope, usually ripstop nylon or polyester, is sewn from vertical panels called gores, with load tapes running up to an aluminium crown ring about 30 centimetres across. Envelopes usually wear out when their airtight coating breaks down rather than the fabric itself. A common passenger balloon holds about 2,800 cubic metres and carries three to five people. To descend, the pilot tugs a line that opens a disc of fabric at the top, the parachute vent invented by Tracy Barnes.
Ed Yost and Jim Winker flew the first modern balloon with an onboard burner on 22 October 1960. Vijaypat Singhania climbed to 21,027 metres over Mumbai in 2005, and in 1991 Per Lindstrand and Richard Branson's Pacific Flyer hit 394 km/h riding a jet stream from Japan to Canada. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones made the first nonstop round-the-world balloon trip in 1999, landing in Egypt after almost 20 days.
Source: Hot air balloon
