Abstract
THE object which stimulated the practical invention of the balloon was its use in war. I say practical invention, because in theory the balloon was invented before the experiment of Montgolfier. Theory is ever the soil of practice. The idea of the balloon has its starting-point in the principle of the pressure of fluids elucidated by Archimedes, of Syracuse, 200 years before the Christian era. The discovery cf hydrogen gas by Mr. Henry Cavendish, in 1760, led Joseph Black, the Professor of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, to suggest in one of his lectures that a weight might be lifted from the ground by attaching to it a sphere of hydrogen gas. A fruitful idea once expressed is rarely lost, however casual its first expression. Some years later, Tiberius Cavallo, an Italian merchant, remembered the remark of Dr. Black, and, in 1782, tested its truth by experiment. He first manufactured some paper bags, which he filled with hydrogen gas: to his disappointment, the subtle gas escaped through the pores of the paper. He then collected the gas in soapy water, and the bubble of gas ascended. A soap-bubble filled with hydrogen was therefore the first balloon. The experiment seems to have been repeated by Cavallo at one of the meetings of the Royal Society, and described in the Transactions of that Society; but neither Cavallo nor his colleague pursued the experiment further, and there was still to be found the peculiar kind of energy that would transform the laboratory experiment into a practical reality. Books are indeed the carriers of thought. It is probably due to a work of Priestley, in which were described those discoveries of Cavallo, and which was translated into French, that Montgolfier, the paper-maker of Annonay, was fired to perform an experiment that is historical. He, as most of you know, filled a paper bag with heated air, the consequence being that the bag rose to the ceiling of the room. Montgolfier was not content with such trifling efforts: a patriotic motive stimulated him to attain greater results—the desire to make the invention of use to France in her wars; and the paper bag of 40 cubic feet capacity was succeeded by one of 680 cubic feet; this, again, by one of 23,000 cubic feet. Montgolfier seemed on the high-road to a brilliant success. There was, however, another brain actively employed in eclipsing the fame of Montgolfier—that of Charles, the Parisian, who realised that heated air would never become a satisfactory method of filling balloons, heated air being three-fourths the weight of the air at the ordinary temperature. He therefore took up the experiments with hydrogen gas where Cavallo had left off. Hydrogen gas being thirteen times lighter than air, its superiority in filling balloons was, to his mind, indisputable. He succeeded in making a material gas-proof, and consequently produced the first practical gas-balloon.
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War and Ballooning 1 . Nature 35, 259–262 (1887). https://doi.org/10.1038/035259a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/035259a0