Balloons in Air

Hot air ballooning - The perfect way to spend your day...

French brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier are acknowledged as being the first persons in the world to construct, inflate and send a balloon up in flight. They were paper manufacturers in the small town of Annonay to the south of France. Whenever they burnt paper, the paper and ash floated up with the heat, and they thought that the smoke had lifting ability. They believed that if a large enough bag could be built to hold all the smoke inside, maybe it might lift and create flight in the air. So, on the 25th April 1783 in the Annonay town square they built a large urn on which was placed hay, wool and dried horse manure. The last two were to slow the release of the heat from the hay and to produce more smoke and also for reducing the naked flame. The balloon was hand-inflated, placed over the urn, then the bag or balloon was allowed to fill with smoke until the heat was great enough to lift it up off the ground and take the weight on ropes being used to tether it to the ground.

Sure enough, it worked! So then, on the 4th June 1783, they went through the same process but this time allowing the balloon to fly freely through the sky until it cooled and landed. Their confidence was growing but not enough to yet put a man aboard, so they decided to try some animals first. On the 16th September 1783, a duck, sheep and rooster were place in a cage and given a safe flight, except that on landing, the sheep panicked and stood on the duck's wing - breaking it. They then believed that the mysteries of the sky could be conquered by man and so negotiations with the King of France allowed a Montgolfier balloon to be flown by the first men over the city of Paris on 21st November 1783. The King wanted a convicted criminal to go aboard and if he met his fate he would have had his just reward, but if he survived he would receive the Royal pardon. However, the Mongolfier brothers insisted that it was important to have men aboard who knew a little more than a convicted criminal and requested that two of their friends, Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent, the Marquis d'Arlandes, fly the very first Montgolfier balloon over the City or Paris on 21st November 1783. The tradition of offering the landowners a bottle of sparkling wine came from the very early days of ballooning when the farmers of France thought that the balloon was a mysterious object possibly from another world. To avoid these farmers attacking the balloon with their pitch forks the pilots offered the farmers a bottle of champagne to prove that the balloon was in fact French, and thanking them for the opportunity of landing on their property.

Balloonists' Prayers

As the early balloonists did not know a lot about the air and believed in the possibility of demons that might strike disaster on them, or incurring the wrath of the god and being struck by thunder or lightning, so they always prayed prior to the flight as follows:

May the winds welcome you with softness,
May the sun bless you with his warm hands,
May you fly so high and so well, that God joins you in laughter,
and sets you gently back into the loving arms of Mother Earth.

There are three mysteries when people go ballooning

They really don't know where they are going, they don't know where they are going to land, and they really do not know who they are going to meet when they get there! So ballooning never developed as a mode of transport.

In fact, it was the lighter-than-air gas balloon that took over and became the favoured balloon flight, as these balloons were easier to fly than trying to get heat into the balloon envelope in those days.

These gas balloons are the ones which have sandbags. If you want the balloon to go up, sand is thrown over to lighten the load, and to come down, gas is vented off. It was the aristocrats of England and Europe who flew balloons for the pleasure of a mystery flight through the sky. Ballooning generally stayed like this through to 1960 when Ed Yost, an American, created the modern burner system using LP Gas (methane and propane) to offer a more sustainable and controlled flight. So, through Raven Industries (the mother company of Aerostar International) the new Hot Air Ballooning revival was started.

Hot Air Balloons have been proved to be five times more effective than any other kind of advertising in terms of cost to benefit ratio. More than a million people visit special ballooning events in the UK every year. What product or event could match hot air ballooning for corporate entertainment purposes?What product or service could match hot air ballooning as a promotional tool?
Advertising balloons are an exciting and innovative marketing
tool. Allow your brand to soar to great heights in the shape of a balloon ....