And there is another, direct, rubber connection. From Wikipedia:
Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers began filling[10] the world's first hydrogen balloon on the 23rd of August 1783, in the Place des Victoires, Paris. The balloon was comparatively small, a 35-cubic-metre sphere of rubberised silk (about 13 feet in diameter),[9] and only capable of lifting about 9 kg.[11] It was filled with hydrogen that had been made by pouring nearly a quarter of a tonne of sulphuric acid onto half a tonne of scrap iron.[11] The hydrogen gas was fed into the envelope via lead pipes; as it was not passed through cold water, the gas was hot when produced, and then contracted as it cooled in the balloon, causing great difficulty in filling the balloon completely. Daily progress bulletins were issued on the inflation, attracting a crowd that became so great that on the 26th the balloon was moved secretly by night to the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower), a distance of 4 kilometres.[12] On August 27, 1783, the balloon was released; Benjamin Franklin was among the crowd of onlookers.[11]Here's the drawing of the peasant attack (which, to be honest, has a touch of an urban myth sound about it, if you ask me):
The balloon flew northwards for 45 minutes, pursued by chasers on horseback, and landed 21 kilometres away in the village of Gonesse, where the reportedly terrified local peasants attacked it with pitchforks[11] and knives[13], and destroyed it.
Surprisingly, as the Wikipedia entry on the history of ballooning goes on to explain, the famous Montgolfier brothers and their first manned hot air balloon flight (in November 1783) was followed only about 10 days later by the first manned hydrogen balloon flight. The balloon itself sounds pretty sophisticated for the times:
The balloon was held on ropes and led to its final launch place by four of the leading noblemen in France, the Marechal de Richelieu, Marshal de Biron, the Bailli de Suffren, and the Duke of Chaulnes.[22] Jacques Charles was accompanied by Nicolas-Louis Robert as co-pilot of the 380-cubic-metre, hydrogen-filled balloon.[9][11] The envelope was fitted with a hydrogen release valve, and was covered with a net from which the basket was suspended. Sand ballast was used to control altitude.[9] They ascended to a height of about 1,800 feet (550 m)[11] and landed at sunset in Nesles-la-Vallée after a flight of 2 hours and 5 minutes, covering 36 km.[9][11][13] The chasers on horseback, who were led by the Duc de Chartres, held down the craft while both Charles and Robert alighted.[13] Charles then decided to ascend again, but alone this time because the balloon had lost some of its hydrogen. This time he ascended rapidly to an altitude of about 3,000 metres[23][13]), where he saw the sun again. He began suffering from aching pain in his ears so he 'valved' to release gas, and descended to land gently about 3 km away at Tour du Lay.[13]It was also an enormously large public spectacle:
It is reported that 400,000 spectators witnessed the launch, and that hundreds had paid one crown each to help finance the construction and receive access to a "special enclosure" for a "close-up view" of the take-off.[13] Among the "special enclosure" crowd was Benjamin Franklin, the diplomatic representative of the United States of America.[13] Also present was Joseph Montgolfier, whom Charles honoured by asking him to release the small, bright green, pilot balloon to assess the wind and weather conditions.[13]Now, in my previous post, I noted that a famous chemist Gay-Lussac did some ballooning. Here's a brief summary:
On Aug. 24, 1804, Gay-Lussac and physicist Jean B. Biot went up in a hot-air balloon to check out the Russian idea. All iron was excluded, excepting a few tools hung on a string far below the open basket. The basket contained, besides the humans, a sheep, a rooster, pigeons, snakes, bees, and other insects. The scientists began making observations at about 8,600 feet and rose no higher than 13,100 feet despite jettisoning everything they could spare. They landed about 48 miles from Paris after 3.5 hours aloft. They found no variation in Earth’s magnetic field.I have questions: at that height, he should have needed oxygen. Also - was the second flight in a hydrogen balloon?
Gay-Lussac went up alone on Sept. 16, 1804. He reached 23,000 feet, Miller says, as calculated from barometric pressure. Gay-Lussac sampled the air at different altitudes and found no change in composition. His altitude record stood for half a century.
But before that, another amusing talk of peasant panic:
The items jettisoned on the foregoing flight included an old kitchen chair. The balloon was invisible in the clouds. The chair landed near a girl tending sheep, and she screamed. The local priest was consulted, but he could opine only that the chair had fallen from heaven or been thrown out by angels. The mystery went away a few days later when news of the balloon reached the village, which was about 20 miles from Paris.OK, more on his very high flights from a different source:
Gay-Lussac got a larger balloon provided with every requisite, and made an ascent by himself on September 16 of the same year. On this occasion the balloon rose to a height of 7016 metres, an altitude greater than any which had been formerly reached, and surpassed only by a few later ascents. At this great elevation of nearly 23,000 feet, and with the thermometer at 9 1/2° C. below freezing, Gay-Lussac remained for a considerable time making observations on temperature, on the moisture of the air, on magnetism, and other points. He observed particularly that he had considerable difficulty in breathing, that his pulse was quickened, and that by the absence of moisture in the air his mouth and throat became so parched that it was painful to swallow even a piece of bread.Annoyingly, I still don't know if that "larger balloon" was hot air, or hydrogen.
This brief site says the latter:
In 1804 Gay-Lussac made several other ascents of over 7,000 meters above sea level in hydrogen-filled balloons.Well, the guy was certainly brave: can you imagine being the first to float up to 23,000 feet, have difficulty breathing, and doing it again?
This warrants further reading....
Update:
Well, this is frustrating. A Gettyimages print, made by who I don't know, is captioned with this:
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac's hot air balloon ascent, Paris, September 1804 (1900). On this flight, French chemist and physicist Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) reached a height of 7016m and confirmed many of the observations he and Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1864) made on their flight of 20 August 1804.But surely it's a hydrogen balloon:
Embed from Getty Images
Update 2: OK, thanks to a subscription to Scribd [have I recommended it before? I am finding it has a lot of interesting and some rather obscure titles, as long as you not looking for current bestsellers] I have found a rather delightful looking book Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, which seems a pretty thorough but general audience history of early ballooning. It has solved the continual confusion I am finding in other sources as to whether Gay-Lussac was going up in a hot air or hydrogen balloon, or both. Here are a couple of pages:
Now, to be clear, the book explains prior to this that Coutelle was a French commanding officer of the Corps d'Aerostiers, which took hydrogen filled (and manned) balloons into battle to use for military observation. He was in Egypt with his balloons in 1798 fighting for Napolean, when Nelson turned up and spoilt the show.
Even allowing for the book possibly being wrong about the type of balloon used on the first ascent (because the earlier extracts above note that Gay-Lussac got a larger balloon for his solo ascent, yet Falling Upwards makes it sound like there was only ever one balloon,) I would say that at least his second, solo and record breaking attempt must have been a hydrogen balloon from Coutelle.
Well, if anyone is still reading, I hope you appreciate how I have tried to clear that up. Please send money.
Amazing how early we had this form of potential transport. Potential transport that needs almost nothing in the form of infrastructure. One supposes that you would want buildings that didn't have a proper roof. But funnily enough, people already have built buildings in this manner for mysterious reasons. So we are kind of "dirigibles ready" so to speak.
ReplyDeleteA form of transport, that doesn't fight gravity, doesn't need infrastructure, and can go straight as the crow flies or take advantage of wind systems. Pretty awesome stuff. Yet it could all be curtailed by a single terrorist attack. Which shows that our form of capitalism is not the one we want. Because we should have recovered from that live-on-radio stunt, and we ought to be using dirigibles on a monthly basis. I mean pretty much everyone.
Its not to be thought that fat things are not aerodynamic. If you've ever seen the effortless way the big fat pin-head seal moves around with only tiny fins you can know that fatness is no problem once you get the shape right.
Bringing dirigibles freight into the current system would be particularly awesome in the information age. Clearly to cut costs businesses want most of their inputs coming on water transport. But manufacturing power comes largely from putting these inputs in the right sequence prior to it arriving at the factory. So when you need to speed things up, short-circuiting the sea route and lengthy docking processes, and picking up the odd container at sea, might be particularly helpful. Even taking one container off one ship and shepherding it ahead to another cargo ship might be useful in a well-oiled transport system.
I now favour slow, patient, communist undertakings that don't cost much on a daily basis, and may not seem to achieve all that much directly, for the purpose of having a catalytic effect. But really we want to get rid of any retained earnings tax for the sole trader and we need to have excellence in money and banking. But if we can't get these later things then very low-cost communist undertakings ought to be started like .... from next Wednesday.