September 7, 2016 • 33 mins
As man was looking to the skies and yearning to fly, two inventive brothers came up with an idea to set humans aloft. The Montgolfiers were among many inventors working toward flight in the 18th century, but they often get all the attention.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Tracy, I
have fantastic news. What is it? This episode is not creepy,
(00:24):
it is not unsettling. 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
(00:49):
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
(01:09):
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 balloon ing, and we actually did
talk about them briefly in the Blanchard episode, but their
work sort of deserves its own episode. Uh. And the
(01:32):
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 Mongolfier, and so I
(01:55):
thought it might be fun to talk about them. Joseph
Michel was the older of the others, born on August
seventeen forty 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
(02:15):
half years later on January six, seventeen. 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,
(02:38):
so his birth certificate and death certificate are opposite. One
says Jacque 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 Andre had fourteen other kids. Uh. That's
a lot of children. Unfortunately, was a very successful businessman,
(03:02):
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
(03:23):
and he had trouble focusing on one thing. Uh, 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
(03:45):
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 his chemistry
knowledge to work to improve the processes in the mills
that they owned. Yeah, every time you see any mention
(04:08):
of Joseph's business 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
(04:30):
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 arise from a fire that
(04:51):
gave them the inspiration to think about how air and
smoke and lift worked, and another suggests that Joseph was
watching his wife's chamis d 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,
(05:16):
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 plot 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
(05:39):
is they did start thinking about it. In Sight 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 monolfier gas. Their theory was that mongolfier gas
(06:00):
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
(06:21):
gas that was present in the air. And we should
also point out that while the Mongolfier's are often credited
with inventing balloon ing, 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
(06:45):
du Goosemo, 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
(07:08):
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,
(07:29):
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 and like that means a
whole lot of qualifier really not yeah, um, And prior
(07:53):
to and during the time that Joseph and Etienne where
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
(08:13):
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 cal Fie 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
(08:34):
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.
(08:56):
So they set up this silk balloon that was lined
with paper. It was huge, It had a diameter of
thirty three feet that's about ten ms, 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 burned that straw in the wall and it
heated the air within their vessel. I bet this was stinky.
(09:17):
Probably it seems like especially the burning wool would be gross.
So once the interior air was heated, the bag rose
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
(09:39):
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 Academy de Sience
wanted to hear all about the balloon experiments, so at
the end went to give a talk there about their work,
(10:01):
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 monkl Fer Brothers was,
(10:22):
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
(10:43):
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
(11:04):
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 Verside to repeat this balloon display for King Louis
(11:25):
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 Mongolfi's needed help, so they called on
the skills of wallpaper maker Jean Baptiste Laivellon, and with
Clavellan's help, they constructed a balloon that was slightly smaller
(11:46):
than the previous one. It had a diameter of thirty
ft about nine meters. But this balloon, which was also
made from taffida, 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
(12:09):
worried about what would happen if it crashed, So walk
King Louis the sixteenth proposed that prisoners be used for
the test. The montolf 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.
(12:32):
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 elements,
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
(12:52):
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 human kinds. 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.
(13:13):
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
(13:34):
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 nineteenth, seventeen eighty three,
(13:59):
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 approximately two miles it'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
(14:20):
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 Mongolfie brothers were eager to step
things up and try a balloon carrying actual humans, and
(14:43):
after a couple of months of prep, on November twenty
one three they made 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 brother stayed on the ground and kind of set
up the whole thing. Though the two people were high
(15:05):
profile balloon enthusiasts. So one of the men was Jean
Placois la Rosier, who was a chemist and head of
the count of Countess de Pauvent'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.
(15:28):
Uh and Rosier had actually been in the balloon before,
so about a month prior, on October fifteenth, 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
(15:50):
to have been the result of effort on a 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
(16:12):
and balloon ing. So it was blue with intricate gold
designs on the exterior, including symbols that were associated with
King Louis ste 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,
(16:35):
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, thankfully, for less than half an hour,
about twenty five minutes, and that took them about five
(16:55):
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 at its lift at Chateau de la Meuette
on the far western side of Paris, and it landed
at LaBute, Okaya. The crowd, which included Benjamin Franklin, was
(17:16):
completely wowed. 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
(17:36):
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
night four. This balloon was massive. It was a hundred
and thirty feet about forty in diameter. Uh. And their
(17:59):
land they 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 the air for about fifteen minutes. However, even with
their increasing triumphs, the Mongolfier's and other ballooning enthusiasts who
were attempting their own projects at flight started running into
(18:22):
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
(18:44):
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 Chaw, launched the first manned hydrogen
(19:07):
filled balloon, which is a terrible idea. Well, it had
its pluses and minus. Ultimately, yes, yeah for the folks
who remember our Hindenburg episode. Yeah, Charles had been working
with hydrogen throughout the time that the mongolf Yer's had
been developing their balloons. He actually started doing this because
(19:29):
he thought that was what they were doing. And although
the brothers barely beat him to man flight, his December
one 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
(19:50):
was like, hydrogen, it's where it's at. On June fifteenth, however,
of Sight five, tragedy struck the ballooning world when Jean
Francois pil 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,
(20:10):
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,
(20:30):
let's pause and talking about one of our fabulous sponsors.
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and have always wanted. While all of this amazing stuff
was going on, it was incredibly exciting to Europe, but
(22:39):
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 f balloons,
(23:00):
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 short of
(23:20):
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
(23:42):
of balloons, and his coat is adorned with both balloon
cuffs and balloon buttons, and his epaulets 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 France, it quickly started to spread
to London and New York over the course of seventeen
(24:05):
eighty three and s 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
(24:26):
Mo went 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. They
were into it. But going back to them on golf
Ye specifically, the issues that they were encountering in their
(24:47):
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. Alongside
balloon development, the montolf Yer had also been working on
parachute ideas, which sounds like a good companion to ballooning Joseph.
(25:09):
Joseph eventually designed one that consisted of a dozen fabric
panels stitched together and attached to a basket which was
cushioned with inflatable pig bladders. They tested this parachute by
dropping a sheep from from a tower. In it maybe
not the most humane, like they were, I'm already I'm
(25:30):
a little both charted, 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
(25:52):
sheep were similar enough to humans to make a broad
sort of comparison in terms of safety, I guess that
was the most plausible here. 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.
(26:12):
But after they stepped away from ballooning, et Tienne went
back to the family business. As you recall, he was
the one that really had a head for business 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,
(26:32):
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 in the economic timult 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
(26:55):
that position at the Lyon office when he became ill
and decided to travel home to Anna, and en route
he got so ill that he decided to stop and
he actually died on August two, sevente Yeah, he was
near Saire at the time. Uh. And as for Joseph,
he went on to invent a liquid distilling apparatus that
(27:15):
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
(27:36):
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 eight ten,
he traveled to Balarue, leban 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
(27:57):
was in the Mongolfier family is actually still in busy ness,
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
(28:18):
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. So it's a
(28:41):
little bit different kind of business, not quite not quite
what you might think of when you think of business
as being bought by another big business. It's a little differ.
And plus if you like if you like art supplies,
then who doesn't like art supply? I do. Even though
I'm bad at art. Nobody is automatically very few people
(29:02):
are automatically really good at art. I know a lot
of artists. Uh. We actually did an interview for House
to Works. This will be my art proselytizing moment that
I think everybody should try it. We did an interview
with Brian Stelfreze, 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
(29:23):
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 is 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,
(29:44):
you can just become skilled at it. Here's what happens
to me at arts of pastors buy beautiful paper and pens.
I bring them home and then they go in a drawer. Uh,
you are are an artful consumer. That kind of am
(30:06):
if you also have some listener mail. I do, and
it's really cool and you haven't seen it yet, so
here we go. It is from our listener Erica. It
is awesome, she says, dear Tracy and Holly, and she
wrote it in a beautiful little fox card. I was
catching up on podcasts and was thrilled to hear your
mention of now bending in your History of Knitting episode.
I am a now bender and also teach it to
(30:26):
my students along with knitting at the college that I
work at. I learned now bending at a folk art
school in Iowa, and the teacher told us a lot
about Norwegian history of the craft. Now bend items, when
felted are very warm and virtually waterproof. Fisherman would wear
now been stockings to keep warm and dry, for example.
Another neat thing about now bending is that if you
(30:48):
cut or tear it, it won't unravel, which is very
different from knitted or crocheted items. I wanted you both
to be able to see and feel now bending, so
I made two phone cozies or whatever you want them
to be. One is not felted so that you can
see the herring bone stitches, and one is felted so
that you can see what a more finished piece looks like.
I hope you enjoy them. Now Bending is also I'm
(31:11):
laughing because Tracy's freaking out. Now Bending is a fun
and flexible craft, so I enjoy spreading the word. Thank
you for the great podcast. My students will be listening
to the knitting one. Oh my goodness. So these are
really cool. I'm actually going to use mine as a
glasses case because it's perfect size for that as well.
In my phone is chunky, so because I feel like
(31:34):
I should, but I don't think you would like that
at the moment. Yeah, it is a warm day and excited. Uh,
it is so cool. These are absolutely beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
It's one of those things that as I was opening
the partial, I was like, what what what is this?
What is this? Is amazing? Uh? And then I read
the card and it got even better. So thank you,
(31:54):
thank you, thank you. These are so cool. I'm actually
borderline and speechless, which everybody knows is rare and freaky deaky.
Thank you so much, Erica. I will put a picture
of those up on our social They are amazing. Like
I said, mine is getting due to use. I'm gonna
use it as a glasses case. So we'll pick one
of each. That's awesome. We'll decide if we want the
(32:16):
felted one or the non felted one, and Tracy and
I will duke it out. Not really, we just chat
and agree. We can work it out when we see
each other for our upcoming live shows, which maybe have
already happened by the time this episode comes out, because
that's soon soon. There's a lot of stuff going on.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at how Stuff works dot com.
(32:39):
We are also on virtually every social network available as
Missed in History, so that includes Twitter as Missed in History, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler.
We're just everywhere is missed in History. Look for that
and you will find us. If you would like to
learn a little bit more about what we talked about today,
go to our parents site how stuff Works Been hot
(33:00):
air Balloon In the search bar you'll get an article
about how hot air balloons work. It does mention them
on Golfi's a little bit uh. If you would like
to visit us, come to miss in history dot com.
Look at all of the previous episodes the show has
ever ever aired, going all the way back to the
beginning with when they were very short, and there have
been many hosts through the years that you can enjoy.
We also have show notes for all of the podcast
(33:22):
episodes that Tracy and I have worked on, as well
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you come and visit us at missed in History dot
com and how Stuff Works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it has to
Works dot
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Tracy, I
have fantastic news. What is it? This episode is not creepy,
(00:24):
it is not unsettling. 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
(00:49):
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
(01:09):
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 balloon ing, and we actually did
talk about them briefly in the Blanchard episode, but their
work sort of deserves its own episode. Uh. And the
(01:32):
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 Mongolfier, and so I
(01:55):
thought it might be fun to talk about them. Joseph
Michel was the older of the others, born on August
seventeen forty 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
(02:15):
half years later on January six, seventeen. 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,
(02:38):
so his birth certificate and death certificate are opposite. One
says Jacque 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 Andre had fourteen other kids. Uh. That's
a lot of children. Unfortunately, was a very successful businessman,
(03:02):
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
(03:23):
and he had trouble focusing on one thing. Uh, 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
(03:45):
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 his chemistry
knowledge to work to improve the processes in the mills
that they owned. Yeah, every time you see any mention
(04:08):
of Joseph's business 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
(04:30):
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 arise from a fire that
(04:51):
gave them the inspiration to think about how air and
smoke and lift worked, and another suggests that Joseph was
watching his wife's chamis d 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,
(05:16):
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 plot 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
(05:39):
is they did start thinking about it. In Sight 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 monolfier gas. Their theory was that mongolfier gas
(06:00):
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
(06:21):
gas that was present in the air. And we should
also point out that while the Mongolfier's are often credited
with inventing balloon ing, 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
(06:45):
du Goosemo, 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
(07:08):
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,
(07:29):
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 and like that means a
whole lot of qualifier really not yeah, um, And prior
(07:53):
to and during the time that Joseph and Etienne where
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
(08:13):
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 cal Fie 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
(08:34):
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.
(08:56):
So they set up this silk balloon that was lined
with paper. It was huge, It had a diameter of
thirty three feet that's about ten ms, 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 burned that straw in the wall and it
heated the air within their vessel. I bet this was stinky.
(09:17):
Probably it seems like especially the burning wool would be gross.
So once the interior air was heated, the bag rose
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
(09:39):
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 Academy de Sience
wanted to hear all about the balloon experiments, so at
the end went to give a talk there about their work,
(10:01):
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 monkl Fer Brothers was,
(10:22):
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
(10:43):
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
(11:04):
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 Verside to repeat this balloon display for King Louis
(11:25):
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 Mongolfi's needed help, so they called on
the skills of wallpaper maker Jean Baptiste Laivellon, and with
Clavellan's help, they constructed a balloon that was slightly smaller
(11:46):
than the previous one. It had a diameter of thirty
ft about nine meters. But this balloon, which was also
made from taffida, 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
(12:09):
worried about what would happen if it crashed, So walk
King Louis the sixteenth proposed that prisoners be used for
the test. The montolf 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.
(12:32):
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 elements,
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
(12:52):
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 human kinds. 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.
(13:13):
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
(13:34):
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 nineteenth, seventeen eighty three,
(13:59):
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 approximately two miles it'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
(14:20):
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 Mongolfie brothers were eager to step
things up and try a balloon carrying actual humans, and
(14:43):
after a couple of months of prep, on November twenty
one three they made 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 brother stayed on the ground and kind of set
up the whole thing. Though the two people were high
(15:05):
profile balloon enthusiasts. So one of the men was Jean
Placois la Rosier, who was a chemist and head of
the count of Countess de Pauvent'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.
(15:28):
Uh and Rosier had actually been in the balloon before,
so about a month prior, on October fifteenth, 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
(15:50):
to have been the result of effort on a 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
(16:12):
and balloon ing. So it was blue with intricate gold
designs on the exterior, including symbols that were associated with
King Louis ste 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,
(16:35):
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, thankfully, for less than half an hour,
about twenty five minutes, and that took them about five
(16:55):
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 at its lift at Chateau de la Meuette
on the far western side of Paris, and it landed
at LaBute, Okaya. The crowd, which included Benjamin Franklin, was
(17:16):
completely wowed. 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
(17:36):
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
night four. This balloon was massive. It was a hundred
and thirty feet about forty in diameter. Uh. And their
(17:59):
land they 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 the air for about fifteen minutes. However, even with
their increasing triumphs, the Mongolfier's and other ballooning enthusiasts who
were attempting their own projects at flight started running into
(18:22):
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
(18:44):
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 Chaw, launched the first manned hydrogen
(19:07):
filled balloon, which is a terrible idea. Well, it had
its pluses and minus. Ultimately, yes, yeah for the folks
who remember our Hindenburg episode. Yeah, Charles had been working
with hydrogen throughout the time that the mongolf Yer's had
been developing their balloons. He actually started doing this because
(19:29):
he thought that was what they were doing. And although
the brothers barely beat him to man flight, his December
one 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
(19:50):
was like, hydrogen, it's where it's at. On June fifteenth, however,
of Sight five, tragedy struck the ballooning world when Jean
Francois pil 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,
(20:10):
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,
(20:30):
let's pause and talking about one of our fabulous sponsors.
I have to confess up front, I feel a little
bit of guilt about this sponsor because their product is
fantastic and I have been too busy to make use
of it lately. That is squares space dot Com. Tracy
(20:51):
and I have been traveling a lot. Work has been
a little busy and stressful, so I haven't had time
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it's going to be as easy and intuitive as it
ever was, and I won't have a steep learning curve
or I'm like, I haven't done this in a while.
I gotta remember how it's so simple it's gonna be awesome.
Uh So, squarespace dot com will enable you to create
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and have always wanted. While all of this amazing stuff
was going on, it was incredibly exciting to Europe, but
(22:39):
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 f balloons,
(23:00):
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 short of
(23:20):
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
(23:42):
of balloons, and his coat is adorned with both balloon
cuffs and balloon buttons, and his epaulets 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 France, it quickly started to spread
to London and New York over the course of seventeen
(24:05):
eighty three and s 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
(24:26):
Mo went 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. They
were into it. But going back to them on golf
Ye specifically, the issues that they were encountering in their
(24:47):
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. Alongside
balloon development, the montolf Yer had also been working on
parachute ideas, which sounds like a good companion to ballooning Joseph.
(25:09):
Joseph eventually designed one that consisted of a dozen fabric
panels stitched together and attached to a basket which was
cushioned with inflatable pig bladders. They tested this parachute by
dropping a sheep from from a tower. In it maybe
not the most humane, like they were, I'm already I'm
(25:30):
a little both charted, 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
(25:52):
sheep were similar enough to humans to make a broad
sort of comparison in terms of safety, I guess that
was the most plausible here. 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.
(26:12):
But after they stepped away from ballooning, et Tienne went
back to the family business. As you recall, he was
the one that really had a head for business 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,
(26:32):
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 in the economic timult 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
(26:55):
that position at the Lyon office when he became ill
and decided to travel home to Anna, and en route
he got so ill that he decided to stop and
he actually died on August two, sevente Yeah, he was
near Saire at the time. Uh. And as for Joseph,
he went on to invent a liquid distilling apparatus that
(27:15):
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
(27:36):
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 eight ten,
he traveled to Balarue, leban 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
(27:57):
was in the Mongolfier family is actually still in busy ness,
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
(28:18):
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. So it's a
(28:41):
little bit different kind of business, not quite not quite
what you might think of when you think of business
as being bought by another big business. It's a little differ.
And plus if you like if you like art supplies,
then who doesn't like art supply? I do. Even though
I'm bad at art. Nobody is automatically very few people
(29:02):
are automatically really good at art. I know a lot
of artists. Uh. We actually did an interview for House
to Works. This will be my art proselytizing moment that
I think everybody should try it. We did an interview
with Brian Stelfreze, 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
(29:23):
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 is 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,
(29:44):
you can just become skilled at it. Here's what happens
to me at arts of pastors buy beautiful paper and pens.
I bring them home and then they go in a drawer. Uh,
you are are an artful consumer. That kind of am
(30:06):
if you also have some listener mail. I do, and
it's really cool and you haven't seen it yet, so
here we go. It is from our listener Erica. It
is awesome, she says, dear Tracy and Holly, and she
wrote it in a beautiful little fox card. I was
catching up on podcasts and was thrilled to hear your
mention of now bending in your History of Knitting episode.
I am a now bender and also teach it to
(30:26):
my students along with knitting at the college that I
work at. I learned now bending at a folk art
school in Iowa, and the teacher told us a lot
about Norwegian history of the craft. Now bend items, when
felted are very warm and virtually waterproof. Fisherman would wear
now been stockings to keep warm and dry, for example.
Another neat thing about now bending is that if you
(30:48):
cut or tear it, it won't unravel, which is very
different from knitted or crocheted items. I wanted you both
to be able to see and feel now bending, so
I made two phone cozies or whatever you want them
to be. One is not felted so that you can
see the herring bone stitches, and one is felted so
that you can see what a more finished piece looks like.
I hope you enjoy them. Now Bending is also I'm
(31:11):
laughing because Tracy's freaking out. Now Bending is a fun
and flexible craft, so I enjoy spreading the word. Thank
you for the great podcast. My students will be listening
to the knitting one. Oh my goodness. So these are
really cool. I'm actually going to use mine as a
glasses case because it's perfect size for that as well.
In my phone is chunky, so because I feel like
(31:34):
I should, but I don't think you would like that
at the moment. Yeah, it is a warm day and excited. Uh,
it is so cool. These are absolutely beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
It's one of those things that as I was opening
the partial, I was like, what what what is this?
What is this? Is amazing? Uh? And then I read
the card and it got even better. So thank you,
(31:54):
thank you, thank you. These are so cool. I'm actually
borderline and speechless, which everybody knows is rare and freaky deaky.
Thank you so much, Erica. I will put a picture
of those up on our social They are amazing. Like
I said, mine is getting due to use. I'm gonna
use it as a glasses case. So we'll pick one
of each. That's awesome. We'll decide if we want the
(32:16):
felted one or the non felted one, and Tracy and
I will duke it out. Not really, we just chat
and agree. We can work it out when we see
each other for our upcoming live shows, which maybe have
already happened by the time this episode comes out, because
that's soon soon. There's a lot of stuff going on.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at how Stuff works dot com.
(32:39):
We are also on virtually every social network available as
Missed in History, so that includes Twitter as Missed in History, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler.
We're just everywhere is missed in History. Look for that
and you will find us. If you would like to
learn a little bit more about what we talked about today,
go to our parents site how stuff Works Been hot
(33:00):
air Balloon In the search bar you'll get an article
about how hot air balloons work. It does mention them
on Golfi's a little bit uh. If you would like
to visit us, come to miss in history dot com.
Look at all of the previous episodes the show has
ever ever aired, going all the way back to the
beginning with when they were very short, and there have
been many hosts through the years that you can enjoy.
We also have show notes for all of the podcast
(33:22):
episodes that Tracy and I have worked on, as well
as occasional other blog posts and notes. So we hope
you come and visit us at missed in History dot
com and how Stuff Works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it has to
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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