4 ms·

Flying circuses led to the first aerial maps of Earth

40 points by miohtama 3y ago

sam_goody 3y ago
I find it hard to imagine that there was no use to the miltitary. There are many places where the airstreams can be estimated fairly reliably, such as off the coast during certain hours of the day. An attacking army was able to setup hundreds of balloons on the deck of the boat, and then float over the city walls and drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them untouchable. Or they could breach the walls of the city by floating over it and landing somewhere inside. (In fact, in a Napoleonic siege - the attacker could setup rows of tethered balloons to heights that will allow them to rain arrows / bullets from the outside without caring about the winds, or the defenders could do the same to rain arrows / bullets on the besieger. Though not sure how often there have been sieges in the past two hundred years.) Of course, there is the issue that they need a safe place to land, but in many cases that is solvable - for example, to attack an island, boats can fish them out on the other side, and in many city areas there is enough area to regroup either past the city walls, or inside the city in a sparser area. And if one built fins, and the winds were low enough, one could actually create direction by flapping, which would be enough in some cases, etc. And that is without further innovations that definitely have been worked out had there been a will. I once heard it said that if the hot air balloons existed when the Romans beat the Greeks (as all the knowledge for it existed but not the application), the world would look different today.
- FearNotDaniel 3y ago
  There were certainly military applications in the intervening time - the article only refers to the immediate 'balloon craze' period following the Mongolfiers' initial flight, after which the hype died down and they didn't seem to immediately catch on for any practical use. But I know with certainty from family records that one of my ancestors, a British Army officer, was involved in surveying parts of India from the air in the late 19th/early 20th century. Still a far cry from the battle scenarios you are proposing, but it is reasonable to say in fact that the military did find a use for balloons eventually...
- ghaff 3y ago
  Japan tried it against the US in WWII. When I learned about this a few years back I was pretty shocked that it was such an obscure factoid that even killed a few people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
- krisoft 3y ago
  > I find it hard to imagine that there was no use to the miltitary. There is a long history of all kind of military ballooning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning > An attacking army was able to setup hundreds of balloons on the deck of the boat, and then float over the city walls and drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them untouchable. If you can park a boat near a city you can destroy it/harass it much easier with just cannons. It is not enough to show that a thing can achieve an effect, but you also have to show that no other thing can achieve a comparable or better effect. > they could breach the walls of the city by floating over it and landing somewhere inside. They can, but that sounds like a recipe to be cut off from your friends and be easy prey to the enemy. And that's if they are lucky and do not drift off target. Not sure if that is a good idea. > attacker could setup rows of tethered balloons I think you are under estimating the amount of support required per balloon. The French Aerostatic Corps during the battle of the Fleurus had one balloon, and they needed 20 man to carry it to position. > And if one built fins, and the winds were low enough, one could actually create direction by flapping Balloons are huge, and they act kind of like a sail. Even in dead calm air, which itself is very rare, you would not get anywhere by human powered flapping because you would need to overpower all the air resistance. You are worse even in the slightest breeze.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    > If you can park a boat near a city you can destroy it/harass it much easier with just cannons. Murphy's first law of combat: if the enemy is in range so are you. With cannons it's even worse, since the defender usually has a height advantage over a ship and thus has more range. And that's ignoring that you can put heavier cannons on city walls than you can put on ships.
  - miohtama 3y ago
    I took a balloon flight recently. There was a ground crew of two cars chasing the balloon to get us landed, or “fished down”. The ground crew must move with the balloon which makes military applications less appealing.
    - 3y ago
- ARandomerDude 3y ago
  > float over the city walls and drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them untouchable Field artillery spotting was also a popular application in the 19th century. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-ballooning https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-balloo...
- miohtama 3y ago
  The article mentions about this. Balloons at the time were too much at the mercy of winds to be useful for military. Even today, or maybe even more today, balloon flights are risky. Landing is difficult, at the best, lethal at the worst you might get burned to crisp in power cables, end up in ocean or a mountain wall. Thus, most balloons can only fly very predefined, tested, routes to avoid complications.
tetris11 3y ago
> He hoped that these “new mechanic meteors” would not be “converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Indeed. There's a 1785 entry in the betting book for Brooks's (a London gentlemen's club) that reads "Ld. Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Ld. Derby, to receive 500 Gs whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a Balloon one thousand yards from the Earth." This was only two years after the first successful ballon ascent.
addled 3y ago
The most sarcastic children's book I've ever read was about ballooning: "Launching, Floating High, and Landing - If Your Pilot Light Doesn't Go Out", by Gary Paulsen (1979). I stumbled upon it at a thrift store a while back. Every turn of the 30 or so pages has a full color photo of a balloon being prepped, flown, or landed, accompanied by a short, large-print paragraph full of snark. The opening: "Hot air ballooning is using hot air in a bag to go up. Gravity brings you down. Every time. It's so much fun that many people only do it once. They get all the fun they need the first time..." There's not much info about it on the internet, what little there is points to a newer 1993 reprint called "Hot Air: Launching, Floating High, and Landing". https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14850023W/Full_of_hot_air?edition=key%3A/books/OL1727158M https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14850023W/Full_of_hot_air?ed... The text is the same, but the pictures are by a different photographer. Maybe I'll figure out how to submit my copy to Open Library this week.
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
Balloons were actually used quite a lot military, having their heyday in WWI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning Looking at the other direction (balloons shot down), there were indeed quite a number of them over the WWI battlefields! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_buster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_buster
CaptWillard 3y ago
And very silly walks.

40 points by miohtama 3y ago

I find it hard to imagine that there was no use to the miltitary. There are many places where the airstreams can be estimated fairly reliably, such as off the coast during certain hours of the day. An attacking army was able to setup hundreds of balloons on the deck of the boat, and then float over the city walls and drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them untouchable. Or they could breach the walls of the city by floating over it and landing somewhere inside. (In fact, in a Napoleonic siege - the attacker could setup rows of tethered balloons to heights that will allow them to rain arrows / bullets from the outside without caring about the winds, or the defenders could do the same to rain arrows / bullets on the besieger. Though not sure how often there have been sieges in the past two hundred years.) Of course, there is the issue that they need a safe place to land, but in many cases that is solvable - for example, to attack an island, boats can fish them out on the other side, and in many city areas there is enough area to regroup either past the city walls, or inside the city in a sparser area. And if one built fins, and the winds were low enough, one could actually create direction by flapping, which would be enough in some cases, etc. And that is without further innovations that definitely have been worked out had there been a will. I once heard it said that if the hot air balloons existed when the Romans beat the Greeks (as all the knowledge for it existed but not the application), the world would look different today.

FearNotDaniel 3y ago
There were certainly military applications in the intervening time - the article only refers to the immediate 'balloon craze' period following the Mongolfiers' initial flight, after which the hype died down and they didn't seem to immediately catch on for any practical use. But I know with certainty from family records that one of my ancestors, a British Army officer, was involved in surveying parts of India from the air in the late 19th/early 20th century. Still a far cry from the battle scenarios you are proposing, but it is reasonable to say in fact that the military did find a use for balloons eventually...
ghaff 3y ago
Japan tried it against the US in WWII. When I learned about this a few years back I was pretty shocked that it was such an obscure factoid that even killed a few people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
krisoft 3y ago
> I find it hard to imagine that there was no use to the miltitary. There is a long history of all kind of military ballooning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning > An attacking army was able to setup hundreds of balloons on the deck of the boat, and then float over the city walls and drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them untouchable. If you can park a boat near a city you can destroy it/harass it much easier with just cannons. It is not enough to show that a thing can achieve an effect, but you also have to show that no other thing can achieve a comparable or better effect. > they could breach the walls of the city by floating over it and landing somewhere inside. They can, but that sounds like a recipe to be cut off from your friends and be easy prey to the enemy. And that's if they are lucky and do not drift off target. Not sure if that is a good idea. > attacker could setup rows of tethered balloons I think you are under estimating the amount of support required per balloon. The French Aerostatic Corps during the battle of the Fleurus had one balloon, and they needed 20 man to carry it to position. > And if one built fins, and the winds were low enough, one could actually create direction by flapping Balloons are huge, and they act kind of like a sail. Even in dead calm air, which itself is very rare, you would not get anywhere by human powered flapping because you would need to overpower all the air resistance. You are worse even in the slightest breeze.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  > If you can park a boat near a city you can destroy it/harass it much easier with just cannons. Murphy's first law of combat: if the enemy is in range so are you. With cannons it's even worse, since the defender usually has a height advantage over a ship and thus has more range. And that's ignoring that you can put heavier cannons on city walls than you can put on ships.
- miohtama 3y ago
  I took a balloon flight recently. There was a ground crew of two cars chasing the balloon to get us landed, or “fished down”. The ground crew must move with the balloon which makes military applications less appealing.
  - 3y ago
ARandomerDude 3y ago
> float over the city walls and drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them untouchable Field artillery spotting was also a popular application in the 19th century. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-ballooning https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-balloo...
miohtama 3y ago
The article mentions about this. Balloons at the time were too much at the mercy of winds to be useful for military. Even today, or maybe even more today, balloon flights are risky. Landing is difficult, at the best, lethal at the worst you might get burned to crisp in power cables, end up in ocean or a mountain wall. Thus, most balloons can only fly very predefined, tested, routes to avoid complications.

tetris11 3y ago

> He hoped that these “new mechanic meteors” would not be “converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
Indeed. There's a 1785 entry in the betting book for Brooks's (a London gentlemen's club) that reads "Ld. Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Ld. Derby, to receive 500 Gs whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a Balloon one thousand yards from the Earth." This was only two years after the first successful ballon ascent.

addled 3y ago

The most sarcastic children's book I've ever read was about ballooning: "Launching, Floating High, and Landing - If Your Pilot Light Doesn't Go Out", by Gary Paulsen (1979). I stumbled upon it at a thrift store a while back. Every turn of the 30 or so pages has a full color photo of a balloon being prepped, flown, or landed, accompanied by a short, large-print paragraph full of snark. The opening: "Hot air ballooning is using hot air in a bag to go up. Gravity brings you down. Every time. It's so much fun that many people only do it once. They get all the fun they need the first time..." There's not much info about it on the internet, what little there is points to a newer 1993 reprint called "Hot Air: Launching, Floating High, and Landing". https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14850023W/Full_of_hot_air?edition=key%3A/books/OL1727158M https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14850023W/Full_of_hot_air?ed... The text is the same, but the pictures are by a different photographer. Maybe I'll figure out how to submit my copy to Open Library this week.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago

Balloons were actually used quite a lot military, having their heyday in WWI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning Looking at the other direction (balloons shot down), there were indeed quite a number of them over the WWI battlefields! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_buster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_buster

CaptWillard 3y ago

And very silly walks.