Today in Technology History
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June 5
Our subject today is a pair of brothers whose inventiveness inspired a new era in the history of human flight -- not the Wrights, but the Montgolfiers.
Since this year is the centennial of the Wright brothers' first successful flight, we've had a special concentration on the history of aviation. But it's worth remembering that airplanes aren't the only way to fly. An unpowered glider can soar through the sky, a helicopter can hover and flit around, and a cannon can even shoot a circus performer in a parabola through the air.
The first successful flying machines were balloons -- and before the Wright brothers invented the airplane, balloons were pretty much the only way to fly. Although there had been plenty of fruitless theories and failed experiments with balloons over the years, the first successful balloons came from two French brothers, Joseph Michel (1740-1810) and Jacques Étienne (1745-1799) Montgolfier.
Their father owned profitable paper mills, and could thus afford to educate his children well. Both brothers were interested in science and technology: Joseph dabbled in chemistry and Étienne studied architecture. Both of them were also involved in their father's paper business, which assured them sufficient income to pursue their amateur scientific investigations.
At some point, probably in the early 1780s, the Montgolfier brothers became interested in the properties of smoke -- and particularly in the way smoke and sparks rise. The brothers began making toy-sized balloons of silk or paper, which they filled with smoke until the balloons rose. At first, the brothers spent a lot of time experimenting with burning different materials to produce the smoke, since they believed that there was some chemical in the smoke that caused their small balloons to rise; only later was it discovered that any hot air would rise, even without smoke.
The Montgolfiers made a full-size balloon measuring about 35 feet in diameter, and they took it out for its first test flight exactly 220 years ago, on June 5, 1783. (Some sources give the date June 4.) For that first flight, the balloon was unmanned, and it was tethered to the ground, but the results were still impressive: it rose several thousand feet in the air, flew for about ten minutes, and came back down to the ground more than a mile away from its starting point.
The Montgolfiers supervised more important balloon flights in 1783, and we'll write more about them later this year.
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