Balloon Ascension Day

Balloons were actively used for aeronautics and travel in the first third of the twentieth century With their help, mail and army corps were transported back in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 The Germans used airships to carry out reconnaissance and raid London during the First World War In honor of the rise into the air on January 9, 1793, aeronaut Jean-Pierre Francois Blanchard, Balloon Travel Day is celebrated The Frenchman of an adventurous mind turned this spectacle into an attraction Before traveling to America, he made 44 flights in Europe In the New World, Blanchard sold tickets for $5 per flight in a basket, which was lifted up by a yellow balloon filled with hydrogen The flight on January 9, 1793 was personally observed by the first US President, George Washington, and French dignitaries Blanchard was not the inventor of the hot air balloon In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers Joseph and Etienne designed a round shell that rose from hot air, and covered it from the inside with paper strips A willow basket was attached to the ball The first travelers, as in space flights, were animals: the brothers sent a rooster, a ram and a duck into the sky In the same 1783, in Paris, in the Tuileries Garden, a balloon filled with hydrogen rose into the sky It was piloted by inventor Jacques Charles and assistant professor M-N Robert At the beginning of the twentieth century They traveled in hot air balloons from Europe to South (Rio de Janeiro) and North America A flight across the Atlantic on the Hindenburg balloon at 200 m above sea level took 43 hours Airships had different shapes, but the most popular were the cigar-shaped “zeppelins,” named after the inventor, the German Ferdinand von Zeppelin The balloons had a metal frame, covered with fabric on the outside, and were enormous in size Inside the airships or under them there was a gondola with a crew, and here were the passenger cabins In the restaurant, tables with white starched tablecloths were served with china and silverware In the salon, where passengers spent their leisure time, there was a small grand piano To lift the zeppelin into the sky, hydrogen was used, stored in cylinders in numerous compartments of the balloon body The engines for the Graf Zeppelin airships were developed by engineer Wilhelm Meibach His division of the company became the Maybach Motornbau company at the end of the First World War In 1917, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany, which owned more than 100 airships, was prohibited from using Zeppelins However, balloons began to be produced for customers from the USA Their balloons were not filled with highly flammable hydrogen, but with safer helium The heyday of airship aeronautics came in 1929, when one of them, the Graf Zeppelin, made a 21-day trip around the world The tragic death in 1937 of the largest balloon, the Hindenburg, the height of a 13-story building, led to the end of the era of giant airships According to official data, the disaster occurred due to a hydrogen leak and explosion during the landing of the zeppelin Conspiracy theories suggest that this and similar incidents with balloons were acts of sabotage, behind which stood the oil king of the 19th century D Rockefeller The "Heavenly Titanics" were to be replaced by airplanes with gasoline engines and further enrich the Anglo-Saxon empire Today, in honor of Balloon Ascension Day, thousands of people around the world take to the air in baskets of hot air balloons for scenic flights On January 9 and other days, airship travel over the savannahs of South Africa and Kenya, the valleys of New Mexico and Turkish Cappadocia are very popular And only the cigar-shaped shape of the balloons rising above Rio de Janeiro reminds us of the zeppelins that became victims of the Rockefellers' development of the oil industry