Hot Air Balloon Book: Build and Launch Kongming Lanterns, Solar Tetroons, and More
Balloon History Where Does the Balloon Come From Historians know that the first human carrying bal loon was designed and built by the Montgolfier brothers in France and it flew for the first time in 1783 But the balloon was not a completely new idea and it is very hard to find out who first thought of lifting things with a bag full of gas In fact there are a surprising number of different countries that claim to be the home of the inventor of the balloon China The Chinese people love paper hot air balloons and there are probably more paper hot air balloons flown in China than in the rest of the world combined The most common balloon used in festivals has a small tapered envelope that has a square cross sec tion at the top that tapers to a round cross section at
the bottom It is usually called a Kongming lantern rather than a balloon because it has a small wax burner inside that produces a bright luminous flame that lights up the whole envelope like a Chinese lantern The balloon was given the name Kongming after the man who is said to have invented it D a A Kongming lantern Zhuge Liang also known as Kongming was an advisor military strategist and chancellor for the Shu Han region during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history He was famous for his wisdom intelligence and cunning He was so clever that he could always invent new and surprising ways of beat ing his enemies even when the situation looked
impossible One of the stories about Zhuge Liang tells how he invented the hot air balloon Zhuge Liang and his troops were occupying the town of Pingyang when his enemy Sima Yi sur rounded it and began a siege hoping to force the famous Zhuge Liang to surrender Sima Yi s troops had occupied the land all around the town and watched carefully for messengers leaving the town So there was no way for Zhuge Liang to send a signal to his allies for help Zhuge Liang noticed that the wind was blowing toward his allies so he asked for a special large lantern to be made with no hole in the top and a wax burner held in the bottom He painted a message onto the side of the lantern and carried it up to a tower on the town wall He lit the burner and released the lantern which floated away in the wind toward his allies Sima Yi s troops below could only watch as the lantern passed overhead carrying a message that asked for help Sure enough Zhuge Liang's allies saw the message rode to Pingyang and rescued Zhuge Liang and his troops Apart from this legend there is no historical evi dence that Zhuge Liang invented the hot air balloon One writer suggested that the Kongming lantern might have been invented by a Chinese lantern maker and then named after the famously clever Zhuge Liang perhaps because it looks a lot like the little square hat Zhuge Liang always used to wear Sadly even this explanation is unlikely as there are
no written descriptions of paper hot air balloons in China before 1783 Italy Francesco Lana was born in 1631 in Brescia Lom bardy an area in the north of modern Italy He became a Jesuit priest and like many Jesuits was encouraged to study so that he could become a teacher Eventually he became a professor of mathe matics and physics at Brescia and while he was teaching there he learned about Otto Von Guericke's experiments at Regensburg and Magdeburg in 1654 Von Guericke had shown that two copper hemi spheres 20 inches 50 cm in diameter could be held together by pumping out the air from the space between them The atmospheric pressure outside the hemispheres was so great that once all the air had been pumped out two teams of eight horses could not pull them apart Lana was fascinated by the experiment but he was particularly interested in the new and more effi cient vacuum pump Von Guericke had invented Lana calculated the weight that must have been lost from the pair of copper hemispheres when the air was pumped out If a sphere could be made from thin enough material then the weight of the air removed from inside the sphere by this new pump might actu ally be greater than the weight of the sphere itself This should make the sphere float in the
