Balloon! History of balloon.
BALLOON
There is no child who does not like balloons. Some grown ups also like balloons. Balloon sellers who are found in all fairgrounds attract children as well as grown ups with their balloons of different shapes and size.
Balloon of today are made up of rubber, latex and other chemical mixed in certain proportions. But the history of balloons starts with production from the urinary bladder of animals. Centuries ago, toys were made up filling the urinary bladder of dead animals with water. This technique has been described in several stories.
In olden days, Comedians and Buffoons used to blow up the urinary bladder and alimentary canal of freshly killed animals to entertain their their audience. These would blow up to form shapes unimaginable even to the blower. there would be a sizeable audience around them, awaiting the shapes that blowing would create.
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The Aztecs of Europe were the first people to blow up the alimentary canal of animals to create figures of various shapes. The intestines of animals , killed to appease the gods were initially used for this purpose. Later intestines of dead men were used . When enough dead bodies for this purpose could not be obtained men were being sacrificed in the place of animals to please gods, While the aim was just to get sufficient length of human intestine.
At that times intestines were used to shape the images of dogs and asses. These images were then brought to the top of Aztecs pyramids with pompous celebration and burnt there appease the sun.
But the method of using huge balloons to fly through the air was arrived at by sheer accident . Two French men who were brothers, Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel Montgolfier were the pioneers in this method of flying. As they were sitting by the fireside one day, in 1783, one of the brothers wondered how smoke could curl and rise up. He enquired of it to his brother. The brother replied that it could be because hot air is lighter than cold air, and the cold air pushes the hot air upwards. The first brother then wondered if a bag filled with hot air wold rise upwards. The two brothers decided to find this out. They filled They filled a big bag that was 35 feet in length and filled it with a brazier of coal.As the air in the bag became hot,the bag rose up gently into the air.
The news of this discovery spread like wildfire.The court,the army and scientists came to know of this discovery.At their request the experiment was conducted once again in Paris.The bag created by the Montgolfier brothers rose up once again into the air making the spectators wonderstruck.
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Hydrogen balloons that are commonly seen to-day were also created by a Frenchman. Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles who was a physicist,chemist and astronomer created a hydrogen balloon in which he travelled 43 kilometres in two hours.
As balloons of this kind gained popularity in France and America, the army started using it for aerial surveys. In the French-Prussian war from 1870- 71, the airlines of both the countries used hydrogen balloons. Again, the French minister, Leon Gambetta, narrowly escaped being hijacked from a balloon at Paris. During both the world wars, several countries used hydrogen balloons to gather information about the movement of the enemy armies.
The toy balloon used by children was made the very next year by a rubber trader called Thomas Hancock. Hancock made a kit consisting of a solution of rubber and a condensing syringe. J. G. Ingram of London created another kind of rubber balloon in 1847 that was not affected by variations in the atmospheric temperature. It was Ingram's balloons that paved the way for the kind of balloons that we see today. Balloons in various shapes, which were originally created only by comedians and magicians, can now be made even by kids, with the arrival of pencil balloons. Pencil balloons brought balloons closet to the masses.
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