11 Other Kinda Exciting Things Involving People and Balloons

So did you guys hear about that kid and the helium balloon, but he wasn’t really in the balloon at all, and he was hiding the whole time? And it was maybe really just a publicity stunt by his somewhat off kilter family? Oh, you did? Really? Well it turns out he wasn’t just the embodiment of an anticlimax, he was also kind of a ripoff as well. Here are some people who really did some far-out things with balloons:

Old School

Balloon Boy’s helium-lofted hoax saucer was a lightweight. Back in the old days, people really knew how to get high: by firing it up. The first ever recorded manned flight of any sort was by balloon: in 1783 the French Montgolfier brothers covered 5.5 miles in about 25 minutes. Sure, there were earlier manned flights, but they weren’t  recorded. And if yesterday taught us anything, it is that if the press wasn’t there, it didn’t really happen, even if it didn’t really happen.

Make It So

Cut to 1931. Swiss inventor Auguste Piccard emphasizes something that Balloon Boy’s non-flight made abundantly clear — you can’t control where a balloon goes, other than up or down. Embracing the up, he creates a pressurized gondola (the thing under the balloon with the people in it), and takes his bulbous monster to a record breaking height of 51,775 ft. After repeated attempts, his final record is about 20,000 feet higher. When he returns to the ground, his fellow citizens applaud briefly, then get back to getting ready to very, very neutral for the next decade or so.

Too Soon?

So if Balloon Boy had perished in any sort of lighter-than-air related mishap yesterday (or actually been at any risk), it would have been about 4.2 femtoseconds before some superwit typed the following: “OH THE HUMANITY!! – What – too soon?” So the 1937 literal crash-and-burn of the Hindenburg (for purists, a dirigible, not a balloon) in the New Jersey Pine Barrens is herein included for reference. This is, for the record, why Balloon Boy’s non-craft was helium, not hydrogen filled. I could go on about the the WWII strategic importance of the US’ control of helium production at this point, but I want you to move on to the next page.

Next Page: Lawn Chair Ballooning, and Richard Branson

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