SYMHC Classics: The Montgolfier Brothers

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. The Mongolfier Brothers ballooning efforts came up in our recent episode on Raincoats, so we are bringing that out today Today's Saturday Classic. So the term manned flight has become a little bit problematic um in terms of it being gendered language in recent years, So if we were recording this show today, we would have used different phrasing. Just def y. I yeah, I don't think that's a thing that we have normally pointed out, but I feel like manned flight gets a lot more immediate criticism than the many other gendered terms that are still in use. So just be aware. This originally came out September, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I have fantastic news. What is it? This episode is not creepy, it's not unsettling. I'm starting well, I love all that stuff. I mean, I legit have a very sort of morbid and morose taste in many things, even though I'm pretty giggly in day to day life. But this one has none of that it's just kind of a cool moment in the development of human technologies. Hooray. Yeah, you're your your episodes were disproportionately jerks there for a while. Yeah, these people not jerks to the best of my knowledge, which is fantastic. So back in October, we had an episode about female balloonists Sophie Blanchard and the balloon omania that was gripping Europe at the time. But today we're going to talk about the roots of that balloon omania. It's pretty close because this was a very explosive moment in terms of interest and excitement about air flight. Uh. And we're going to talk about the inventive minds of two brothers that really shaped ballooning. And we actually did talk about them briefly in the Blanchard episode, but their work sort of deserves its own episode. Uh. And the inspiration for this episode actually came from working on a house Stuff Works article a while back about drones that I was editing. UM and our art department put together this really fantastic interactive graphic about the ways humans have taken to the skies and unmanned vehicles over the years, and one of the earliest points on that clickable timeline featured Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, and so I thought it might be fun to talk about them. Joseph Michel was the older of the brothers, born on August and Anna A, France. He would go on to go by Joseph Jacques, Etienne or Etienne Jacques, depending on which the document you're looking at, was generally just called Etienne, and he was born about four and a half years later on January six, seventy. So for the timeline, if you are a fan of our prior, uh, Sophie Blanchard episode, I was about three decades before she was born. Yeah. And the discrepancy in terms of talking about Etienne is that his name is listed different ways on different documents. So his birth certificate and death certificate are opposite. One says Jacques Etienne, one says Etienne Jacques. Just heads up there if you're like, why, why are they flippy? Uh? And in addition to these two brothers, their father, Pierre Mongolfier, and their mother and dere had fourteen other kids. Uh. That's a lot of children. Unfortunately, Pierre was a very successful businessman, so he was able to support that massive family, and the way he did so was through a family business, because the Mongolfier's owned a number of paper factories in France, all of which were doing pretty darn well. Joseph attended private school and then Jesuit College, but school just really didn't quite agree with him. His mind was really busy and he had trouble focusing on one thing, sort of like some other people in the room right now. He eventually left to start his own chemical business in Paris. At the end went to school to be an architect, although he was also interested in science, and it wasn't long before both he and his brother continued to run the family business as adults. At the end was better better at the business side of things. He had become the head of the family's paper factories at age thirty after Pierre retired and their brother Raymond, who had been in charge of the business, passed away. Joseph, on the other hand, was always interested in innovating and putting his chemistry knowledge to work to improve the processes in the mills that they owned. Yeah, every time you see any mention of Joseph's bus this acumen. Like at one point he was running his own chemical business. He was not good at that part of it. He tended to lose a lot of money because, as we said, well little focus issues. But the income from the paper factories would give Joseph and Etienne the financial freedom to explore and experiment in the science of ballooning. And it's not entirely clear why or how the two began thinking about air flight. There are so many apocryphal stories about how this happened. One was that watching bits of burning paper lift into the air from a fire got them started. Another was that it was simply watching smoke rise from a fire that gave them the inspiration to think about how air and smoke and lift worked. And another suggests that Joseph was watching his wife's chemise dry over a fire and he noticed how the fabric billowed out as warm air was trapped underneath it. But we do not know if any of those are true or not. They all sound like ballooning versions of being hit with an apple, yeah, very much, depending on which biography you are looking at. Uh, and most modern ones kind of acknowledge. We don't know. But some of the older accounts and even accounts that the gentleman gave in their lives. They shift a lot, and you can tell it's kind of like, we don't know, so we're just going to PLoP something here that that makes some sort of sense. So that's why we have a billion different stories about it. But the important thing is they did start thinking about it. In two the brothers observed that when heated air was contained in a lightweight vessel made of paper or fabric, that vessel would rise. They actually thought they had discovered a new type of gas that was lighter than air, and they named that Montgolfier gas. Their theory was that Mongolfier gas was contained in the smoke from the fire and that it possessed a property that they called levity, which brightens my day a little bit. It's very charming. Of course, over time, it would, you know, prove that it was it was just the heat that was, you know, making the regular air rise, not activating some sort of hidden gas that was present in the air. And we should also point out that while the Mongolfiers are often credited with inventing ballooning, and while we were talking about them specifically at length today, they were certainly not the only people experimenting with the idea of flight, and they were not even the first to be filling lightweight bags with air to make them float. Portuguese priest Bartolomeo Lorenzo du Guzmo, which I'm probably butchering, was floating small balloons in the early seventeen hundreds, and he was working on designs for a much more sophisticated airship based on those balloon experiments when he died in seventeen twenty four. It appears, however, that the Mongolfiers did not know about those ballooning experiments going on in Portugal earlier in the century. Filling balloons with hot air to lift them up was also employed in China, way before Europeans ever got this idea. Rising lanterns of this nature were common in China as early as the third century, So this was a long time before before Europeans were even thinking, Hey, maybe if I failed a bag with this, it would rise. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever I see like this sort of and I know because we both work in editing and we do copy that sometimes you just have to like cut down extraneous stuff to make a point. But whenever I see like a blurb or something that says the Mongolfier's first ever, you know, achieve balloon flight. I'm like, that needs a whole lot of qualifier, really, not um and prior to and during the time that Joseph and Etienne were at work on their ballooning efforts, there were also so many other of their contemporaries in Europe working on similar ideas. And we're mentioning all of this just to make clear that while these two gentlemen do get a lot of credit for inventing manned flight, it might be more accurate to say that they were two of many who were working towards that goal at the same time, and a bit of lucky timing happened to be on their side. In April of three, the Monk Alfie has began testing their theories and earnest creating various models of balloons from fabric and paper and then trying out their air worthiness. They also experimented with different flammable media to determine what would burn the best at the most controllable rate to heat the air so that it didn't just become an alarming conflagration of burning balloon. Yeah, there were some instances that happened, and they're testing, but on June four three, the brother duo went to the n and A marketplace to present their work in heated air by way of demonstration. So they set up the silk balloon that was lined with paper. It was huge. It had a diameter of thirty three feet that's about ten meters, and they arranged straw and carded wool beneath the balloon. They had determined that burned the best under the bags only opening, so then they earned that straw in the wall and it heated the air within their vessel. I bet this was stinky. Probably it seems like, especially the burning wool would be gross. So once the interior air was heated, the bag rows up off the ground. Estimates placed at an altitude of about three thousand feet which is a little more than nine meters at the highest that it reached. After staying aloft and drifting for about ten minutes, the balloon then drifted back down to earth, finally landing about a mile and a half or two point four kilometers from the marketplace where they started out this demonstration. And this was pretty exciting to everyone, and the success of their n n A display led them to Paris l Academy decience wanted to hear all about the balloon experiments, so Etienne went to give a talk. They're about their work, and the pair were honored by the Academy for that work. And if you're wondering why only Etienne spoke with the Academy in Paris, it was because the pair were wanted in many places at once once they had done this demonstration, So Joseph was speaking at the Lyon Academy at the same time. We're going to talk briefly about how very not accidental the success of the moncol Fer Brothers was. But first we will pause for a brief moment from a sponsor. It sounds grand, so all of this attention and praise was not, as we mentioned a moment ago, a situation where two gents were just goofing about and accidentally found themselves the toast of the country. Uh. Keep in mind too, that these weren't like super young guys. They were in their thirties at this point, so they were strategic thinkers. They were very smart men, and they had selected this date for their ant and a exhibition to coincide with a meeting of local leaders, so that people with some influence could witness what they had been working on. Etienne and Joseph were hoping to get the attention of the crown and launched their careers as scientific elites financially supported by the king, and that plan to get the head of the country interested in their balloons actually worked. From the presentation in Paris, the brothers headed to Versailles to repeat this balloon display for King Louis the sixteenth, but this time they aimed for a bigger, more ambitious experiment. They wanted to send a more structured balloon up and this time have passengers, and to execute the project, the Mongolfier's needed help, so they called on the skills of wallpaper maker Jean Baptiste Lavillon, and with Lavillan's help, they constructed a balloon that was slightly smaller than the previous one. It had a diameter of thirty ft about nine meters, but this balloon, which was also made from tafida, was varnished with alum to fireproof it and it had a decorative painted finish. The selection of passengers was also a significant step in the process. There were some serious concerns about what flight in a balloon might do to a body I'm assuming they were also worried about what would happen if it crashed, So walk King Louis the sixteenth proposed that prisoners be used for the test. The Montolfe has decided to go with a different plan, And this is kind of one of those things that you'll often see cited as a wacky thing, but the reasons for it are pretty cool. So those first riders in in the Mongolfier balloon baskets, we're not humans. They were a duck, a rooster, and a sheep, and the logic was that since the duck was a naturally flying animal, it was considered something of a control element, and the rooster was selected because it was a bird, but it was one which flew only short, short distances, very close to the ground, so it was like the next level of risk up from the duck in terms of what its body might be able to handle. And then the sheep was believed to be similar enough to a human physiologically that its success or failure as a passenger would give a pretty clear indication of whether ballooning was safe for humankind. Might be the silliest criteria for an experiment we have ever talked about I love it, though there's a logic to it. It's kind of silly. But I always wonder what kept the duck from flying out, but that's never covered. It's just I mean, similarly to the one that we had about the volcano that the people fought by spraying water at it. This whole idea of the balloon animal tests just sounds like child logic to me. It's like it's like the brainstorming effort of a kindergarten class. However, this occasion was anticipated with great excitement. About a hundred and thirty thousand people, including the King and Marie Antoinette, were on hand to witness this historic moment. And it's very odd. Cargo and those three Barnyard aeronauts were successfully launched on September nine, eighty three, and they flew for eight minutes. So animal lovers in the crowd you may have already guessed because I'm giggly about it, We'll be happy to know that the feathered and wally trio made a perfectly safe landing, although they had drifted a p sxtimately two miles that's about three point two kilometers while they were making history in the air. I hope they weren't scared. I'm sure they were probably a little confused and possibly scared. Like I said, I don't know why the duck wouldn't just be like I'm out. I'd be like, I'm not having your Shenanigans. A world of note to this balloon. As the animal experiment had gone so well, the Mongolfier brothers were eager to step things up and try a balloon carrying actual humans, and after a couple of months of prep, on November one, they made a history by launching the first manned, untethered balloon flight. And the two men who got to experience that exhilarating flight were not the Mongolfie brothers. Uh. The brothers stayed on the ground and kind of set up the whole thing though the two people were high profile balloon enthusiasts. So One of the men was Jean Flancois Pila a Rosier who was a chemist and head of the count of Countess de Pouvent's Cabinet of Physics, Chemistry and natural History, who was known for his very flamboyant approaches to communicating science concepts. He would be a really fun topic for the future f y, I he might be uh and Palapa Rosier had actually been in the balloon before, so about a month prior, on October fifte the Mongolfies had launched a tethered test flight with him as the human occupant, and that lasted just four minutes. The other gentleman was Francois Laurent Marquis Darland, who was a soldier and a noble. His inclusion in the event is said to have been the result of efforts on the part of the king to ensure that someone from the nobility was part of this historic moment when human flight was achieved. And the balloon itself was a rather spectacular looking thing. If you do an Internet search for it, you'll see many, many pictures, and there are even modern balloons that have been designed to replicate it because it's it's so iconic and balloon ing. So it was blue with intricate gold designs on the exterior, including symbols that were associated with King Louis. Remember they were very into currying favor with the king. And the passenger area this is kind of the part of it that I really love. The passenger area was not a basket like you'd see on a balloon, today that sat underneath it, but rather a ring around the opening at the bottom of the balloon. Uh, where heat could be applied to the air within. So you have to picture it's sort of like a flanged bottom, and then the flange forms this little ring that that the the human occupants could be in, and there was also a red bunting around the passenger area. It was very festive. They flew for less than half an hour, about twenty five minutes, and that took them about five and a half miles or eight point six kilometers in the process. As they rose up into the air, they doffed their caps to the spectators below and their balloon had started. It's it's lift at Chateau de la Meuette on the far western side of Paris landed at LaBute Okaya, the crowd, which included Benjamin Franklin, was completely woud. Yeah. Ben Franklin wrote about them a bit in his his accounts of his time in France, so uh, they're on record in his writings and ever looking to the next level of achievement, the next plan for the French Brothers was to carry larger groups of people by air, and to that end, just two months after that first untethered flight, and after a failed start that they had tried to make which was derailed by rain in a small fire, they did launch a balloon carrying Joseph and several passengers into the air in Lyon, France, on January nineteen eighty four. This balloon was massive. It was a hundred and thirty feet about forty meters in diameter. Uh, and they're landing on this one was not ideal because the air in the balloon cooled really rapidly and it caused a much speedier descent than they were planning. But everyone did make it back safely, although they had only been in year for about fifteen minutes. However, even with their increasing triumphs, the mongolfiers and other ballooning enthusiasts who were attempting their own projects at flight started running into the same problems over and over. And for one thing, they hadn't figured out how to steer the balloons. They would pretty much go up and then be at the mercy of the air. For another, the altitude that a balloon could reach and the distance that it could travel were limited by the air in the balloon, which of course was cooling off over time, and concerns about fire initially led people away from the idea of keeping some sort of onboard flame going to stay in the air, and so alternate gases were considered. Uh, this is part of why just ten days after the Mongolfier sent Pila Rosier and Laurent Aloft for the first time, another inventor, Jacques Alexembles ces au Chao, launched the first manned hydrogen filled balloon, which is a terrible idea. Well, it had its pluses and minus for the folks who ultimately yes, yeah for the folks who remember our Hindenburg episode, Yeah, Chills had been working with hydrogen throughout the time that the mongolf Yer's had been developing their balloons. He actually started doing this because he thought that was what they were doing. And although the brothers barely beat him to manned flight, his December one Sight three launch flew twenty seven miles which is forty three point five kilometers, and it lasted for two hours. This was quickly recognized as a superior way to get people into the air. Yeah, so at that point everyone was like, hydrogen is where it's at. On June fifteenth, however, of seventy five, tragedy struck the ballooning world when Jean Francois pla Rosier died in a ballooning accident. He was crossing the English Channel in a balloon which was filled with a combination of hot air and hydrogen when it exploded, and so less than two years after he made history in untethered flight, the hobby for which he held so much enthusiasm claimed his life and also made him its first fatality. Next up, we will talk a little about how all this balloon business was affecting the fashion culture of France. But before we get into hats and hair news, let's pause and talk about one of our fabulous sponsors. While all of this amazing stuff was going on, it was incredibly exciting to Europe, but especially to France since a lot of the big steps were happening there, and soon balloon themed items were popping up everywhere. There were balloon motifs on almost everything that you could imagine, including clothing. I would totally go for a T shirt with that first animal crew as balloon passengers, I would too. Everything from embroidered motifs to hats designed to look like balloons became really trendy and fashionable. The hairstyles that women started wearing, especially if they were fans of balloon ing, were sometimes styled into these bulbous shapes to look like balloons. People were, in shortgoing sort of bananas with balloon fashion, to the point that a satirical cartoon entitled lum oh ballon lafolly du jour, that's the Man of balloons or the folly of the day was published. And this illustration features a gentleman wearing basically balloon everything. His shirt and pantaloons are drawn to mimic the shape of balloons, and his coat is adorned with both balloon cuffs and balloon buttons, and his ebulets and shoe buckles and hair adornments are all balloons, and in lieu of a cocade, a mini balloon sits as a decorative element on his hat. And while all of this fascination with balloon fashion started in Ants, it quickly started to spread to London and New York over the course of seventeen eighty three and sev four. But of course fashion is pretty fickle. The more outlandish the trend, often the shorter it's lifespan, so By the time balloon everything had become popular with the medal class, the trend setters who had initially adopted it were done with balloons. Balloons over next moving on to ships. Uh, yeah, it's started fabulous. There's a if you There was actually a hat called him on Golfier hat which was inspired by balloon ing has kind of a big poofy crown on it. You're into it. But going back to them on golf Ye specifically, the issues that they were encountering in their balloon development efforts, particularly the flight control, eventually led the brothers away from ballooning. They kind of felt like they had done as much as they could do, but their careers in science and invention did not end there. A longside balloon development, the Mongolfier had also been working on parachute ideas, which sounds like a good companion to ballooning Joseph. Joseph eventually designed one that consisted of a dozen fabric panels stitched together and attached to a basket which was cushioned with inflatable pig ladders. They tested this parachute by dropping a sheep from from a tower in it maybe not the most humane like like they were. I mean already, I'm a little both children, both charmed and upset by sending animals up in the balloon. But I'm more upset by throwing a sheep off a tower. I actually was too when I was researching this, and I did not see anything definitive about how the sheep fared in all of that. But in their minds, since they had already established that sheep were similar enough to humans to make a broad sort of comparison in terms of safety, I guess that was the most plausible he or I think, when we're done recording, I'm gonna just make a little comparison chart of sheep and human figure out how exactly are we that similar. But after they stepped away from ballooning, Etienne went back to the family business. As you recall, he was the one that really had a head for businesses and was quite good at it, and he made strides in the paper industry when he invented a vellum production process. He was also recognized as a leader in the field of paper production, and he was given the title Manufacturer Royale, which basically meant he was at the top of his field, and perhaps his greatest achievement, though in this period of his life was keeping that business running successfully throughout the turmoil of the revolution and the economic tumult that gripped France in the wake of the power shift. He also got involved in community and government and eventually became the paymaster of the French War Department. He was serving in that position at the Lyon office when he became ill and decided to travel home to ann and A, and en route he got so ill that he decided to stop and he actually died on August two sev Yeah, he was near Serrere at the time. Uh. And as for Joseph, he went on to invent a liquid distilling apparatus that could function at reduced pressure and temperature compared to others UH. And he also invented an application of that device that could be used to dry fruits. And he also invented a hydraulic ram that was used for raising water. So he really was doing a lot of interesting things. And for those accomplishments, he was made a member of France's Legion of Honor, and he was appointed to the Institute of France. And he basically worked constantly as both an inventor and a lecturer until eighteen o nine, when he retired due to failing health. In June of eighteen ten, he traveled to Balarue, cleban in the hopes that the curative waters there would improve his condition, but in fact he died there on June. And the paper company that was in the Mongolfier family is actually still in business, although after changing names to cancel On Emmagoulfier and now it is just cancel On. Yeah, I kind of love that it's still going on. I read a thing but didn't verify it, so don't take this as fact that it is in the midst of possibly being purchased. So by the end of this year it might be owned by a different company, and I don't know if it will change names, but right now it is cancel Paper and it still exists and has been around since the early seventeen hundreds. I was going to say Unilever, because it seems like every consumer product we talked about ultimately ends up. No, it's an Italian company that I think is allegedly buying them. They primarily focus on making art papers. It's not like a business paper manufacturer nice, so it's a little bit different kind of business. Not quite not quite what you might think of when you think of business that's being bought by another big business. It's a little different. And plus if you like if you like art supplies, then they who doesn't like art supplies? I do. Even though I'm bad at art. Nobody is automatically very few people are automatically really good at art. I know a lot of artists. Uh. We actually did an interview for House Touff Works. This will be my art proselytizing moment that I think everybody should try it. We did an interview with Brian Stelfreese, who is a well known comic book artist and has been working on the Black Panther comic. And one of the things that came up in our interview when I asked if he just ever has that moment of like, man, I'm super good at this, and he said, you know what, I don't have natural talent. He has a brother that is very, very talented, and he said, mine is just years and years of practice and skill and learning that masquerades as talent to people that do not know that I have put in all that time. But he's kind of like the tale of if you love something and you really work at it, you can just become skilled at it. Here's what happens to me at art Supplas. Stars buy beautiful paper and pens. I bring them home and then they go into drawer. Uh, you are an artful consumer. That kind of am Bay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M