Who doesn't want to fly?? From ancient times, humans have looked to the Heavens and imagined what it might be like to glide among the clouds. 1000 years before the birth of Christ, the Psalmist looked in wonder to the skies and imagined flying through them, writing, "If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 9 If I fly on the wings of the dawn and settle down on the western horizon, 10 even there your hand will lead me; your right hand will hold on to me."
But flight wouldn't be possible for humans for another 2800 years after he pinned those words, and even then, in the early and pioneering days of human flight, it was a dodgy and dangerous business. Today we are going to trace the history of human flight in a very non-traditional way. From wingsuits to straw-powered balloons, to flying bombs and levitating lawn chairs flying as high as jet planes. This episode's song, which you can hear in full at the end of the podcast is all about the first human-powered flight, a failed jump off of the Eiffel Tower, the Hindenburg Disaster and Lawnchair Larry's amazing trip across the West coast floating at 16,000 feet in his lawnchair. Here's a little preview, put together just for the InterestingPod by our friends in Dayton, Ohio, the band Four for Flying out of the Kayfabe Municipal Airport.
Franz Reichelt was an amazing guy, and a wannabee aeronaut who should serve as a cautionary tale for those who want to fly. Reichelt was born in Austria-Hungary, and immigrated to France in 1898, where he opened a successful dressmaking business. As you might guess, Franz was unmarried, because any married man who tried to jump off of a tall tower in a homemade wingsuit would be beaten mercilessly by his sensible wife until he gave up on the idea before it happened. At least, that's what my wife would do. In love.
Somewhere around the summer of 1910, Reichelt began to develop what he called a "parachute-suit" which was just a little more bulky than one normally worn by an aviator, but also contained some rods, a silk canopy and a small amount of rubber that should have allowed it to fold out to become what Reichelt hoped would be a practical and efficient parachute/wingsuit outfit. The February 5, 1912 edition of the Paris Le Petit Journal suggested that Reichelt had made a couple of experimental test jumps with dummies wearing his wingsuit from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower at some point in 1911.
L'Ouest-Éclair similarly noted that in 1911, Reichelt had personally jumped from a height of around 30 feet at Joinville; a failed attempt that didn't lead to serious injury because of a pile of straw that he landed on. The Le Matin newspaper reported an attempt at Nogent from a height of 8 metres (26 ft) that ended with a broken leg.
Pretty much all of Reichelt's later tests failed, including the Eiffel tower ones, but Reichelt insanely convinced himself that the reason for their failure was not a design problem, but because the tests took place TOO CLOSE TO THE GROUND.
So logically, he decided that his suit would perform better when used on a much HIGHER jump. Yeah, that's the ticket.
The Tailor Who Tried to Fly: Franz Reichelt's Leap into History (and the Ground)
On February 4, 1912, Paris awoke to an icy winter morning, a biting wind off the Seine, and the curious sight of a small Austrian-born tailor preparing to defy both gravity and common sense. Franz Reichelt, a 33-year-old single man whose moustache was as impressive and ambitious as his dreams - think Hercule Poirot here - stood at the base of the Eiffel Tower wearing his own invention: a hybrid contraption somewhere between a parachute, a wingsuit, and a very heavy set of curtains with a metal exoskeleton. I'm no engineer, but taking a look at his design, I imagine that if I wore it to jump off of my dresser onto my bed, it would hurt me worse to have it on when I landed, than not. Would Reichelt be correct, however, that his suit was made to thrive at high altitude jumps, rather than low altitude? You be the judge.
Reichelt had a goal as noble as it was dangerous, which was to save the lives of aviators by giving them a wearable parachute they could deploy in midair. In an age when flying machines were fragile and safety regulations were more of a suggestion, this was no small contribution. Unfortunately, Reichelt also possessed a confidence so unshakable that it refused to be weighed down by things like wind resistance, aerodynamics, or prior testing from a safe height. There is a reason that most Darwin award winners are male.
To be fair to Reichelt, he had previously tested versions of his wingsuit with some slight success. He dropped dummies from his fifth floor apartment building window, and his wingsuit had successfully protected them from harm. I doubt those dummies were made of ballistic gel, or were roughly as dense as humans, but we'll never know.
Unfortunately, later tests of his wingsuit design did not perform as well as the early tests, which probably should have been an important data point for our guy.
Here's how it happened. Reichelt had told the authorities that he was going to test his parachute from the Eiffel Tower using a dummy. This seemed sensible. After all, the Eiffel Tower is over 300 feet tall, and no human had yet tried to jump from it without immediately regretting the decision. However, when the big day came, the "dummy" turned out to be Reichelt himself. This reveal did not delight the Paris police, who had envisioned more of a "stuffed sack of flour" situation and less of a "live, breathing tailor with rent payments due" kind of scenario.
The police tried to talk him out of it. His friends begged him to reconsider. A gathered crowd of journalists, photographers, and curiosity-seekers watched as he dismissed their concerns. "I want to try the experiment myself and without trickery, "as I intend to prove the worth of my invention." he declared. Famous last words, I guess. Whether this was courage, stubbornness, or the 1912 equivalent of, "Hold my beer," is still up for debate. Maybe Reichelt was actually born in Alabama? Nah, I'm just kidding. I think I can say that, because I myself was born in Alabama. Roll Tide!
Now, about the suit: Imagine a heavy wool overcoat mated with a camping tent, then adopted a bat costume as its personal trainer. That's roughly the silhouette. It was meant to fold up neatly for walking, then spread open to catch the air when falling. Reichelt believed it would open like the wings of a bird, cradle him gently, and float him to safety. The problem? Physics.
Up on the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, Reichelt paced. The cameras rolled, yes, this was all caught on film, and yes, you can watch it today if you're feeling historically morbid. I don't recommend it, but I will tell you that he looks a lot like what the 1912 version of French Batman would look like, had superhero comic books existed back then. He tested the air, peered over the railing, and for a moment, seemed to have doubts. Then, with the kind of determination that makes both heroes and headlines, he climbed onto the railing, hesitated briefly, and leapt. Well, actually, that's not accurate. He really hesitated for a long time…literally 29 seconds, and yes, I timed it. It's hard to watch, and he looks, just - so brave…and so foolhardy.
What followed was not flight. The suit, perhaps offended at being dragged into this, did not blossom into a parachute. It stayed mostly folded, flapping only slightly, the aerodynamic equivalent of a sigh. It just didn't work, didn't come close to working. Imagine a rock with a handkerchief parachute, and it looked something like that. The suit flaps helplessly in the wind, not even slowing Reichelt by a fraction, and he fell to earth like a very stylish anvil, striking the frozen ground moments later.
He died immediately, which I guess is a small mercy, but it's really heartbreaking to see, and I mean that literally. Not funny at all. What he did was just really dumb, but also really brave and really poignant. As I said, Like the Hindenburg disaster, Reichelt's jump took place AFTER the invention of motion pictures, and there is video readily available online of both the airship burning up as people flee, and of Reichelt's fateful and foolish jump. That said, I don't advise you to watch either. They are both disturbing without being the least bit gory.
The press called him "The Flying Tailor," but he didn't fly at all. His jump became infamous not only for its tragic outcome but for the fact that it was witnessed by so many, recorded for posterity, and served as a grim reminder that bravery and wisdom are not the same thing.
In fairness to Reichelt, wearable parachutes were still in their infancy, and someone had to push the boundaries. Unfortunately, pushing the boundaries without rigorous testing tends to result in pushing up daisies. His design wasn't entirely mad, and he was genuinely onto something. He was really something of a pioneer and later inventors would successfully create wingsuits and compact parachutes, but the materials, the weight, and the lack of prior human trials made success for Reichelt virtually impossible. He had the right idea but not the rigor needed to test that idea, admit failure and do the work to fail and keep failing forward until success can be found. Success for a pioneer never comes easy. There has to be volumes of trial and error, and Reichelt was just impatient with the process. We should learn from that!
That said, it's hard to dismiss him as merely foolish. I admire the guy…The man had vision. He wasn't motivated by money or fame alone, though both would have been welcome. His goal was to save lives. He was a craftsman trying to solve a deadly problem with needle, thread, and imagination. He was a tailor, a skilled clothesmaker. If he had worked with a process, accepted failure, and kept attacking the problem with perseverance, he might have succeeded in making something helpful. Maybe not a suit that you can jump off of the Eiffel Tower with, but something useful and helpful that wouldn't have cost him his life. He simply overestimated the readiness of his invention and underestimated the unforgiving nature of Parisian gravity.
In the end, Franz Reichelt left behind more than a cautionary tale. He left a curious mixture of admiration and sadness. Admiration for his courage to strap his own fate to his work, and sadness that such determination led him not into history's hall of successful innovators, but into its wing of "ambitious experiments that should've stayed in the lab."
His leap stands as a peculiar footnote in the early years of aviation, a reminder that progress is often written in a ledger of both victories and spectacular miscalculations. And if there's any silver lining, it's that Franz Reichelt, for all the grim outcome, has been immortalized in history — a man who sewed his dream together and dared to wear it, right to the edge. Gravity won that day, but even in loss, Franz Rechelt was immortalized.
What does it take for one man - or woman - to reach the Heavens? For the vast majority of human history, there was no answer to that question, right up until the late 18th century when the first human-powered flight in history took place.
Every American pretty much knows Orville and Wilbur - the famous Wright Brothers, but almost nobody knows the REAL pioneers of human flight - the French Montgolfier brothers – Joseph-Michel Montgolfier 26 August 1740 – 26 June 1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier mohn-gohl-FEE-ay
Now, the Montgolfier brothers are absolutely extraordinary and might be the subject of a future InterestingPod. Their achievements, for whatever reason, are far greater than their current fame. They literally performed the FIRST HUMAN-POWERED FLIGHT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, which is just profoundly amazing. In terms of being pioneers, they SHOULD be up there with Neil Armstrong, Johannes Gutenberg, Marco Polo, and Carl Benz, Jacques Cousteau - one of the Montgolfier brothers was the FIRST HUMAN to FLY, - a big, big deal!
Specifically, Etienne Montgolfier was the first human aeronaut - and if you aren't familiar with that quaint and old-school term, an aeronaut is someone who participates in aeronautics, which generally refers to the science and technology of flight. Specifically, it often refers to someone who flies or navigates lighter-than-air aircraft like balloons. The term is related to "astronaut," but specifically applies to those involved with aeronautics, not necessarily space travel.
And you know what? The deck was kind of stacked against the Montgolfier brothers to begin with. They were part of a family of 18 - two parents, SIXTEEN kids. You'd think they were the firstborns, but actually Joseph-Michel was #12 and Etienne #15, but Etienne was so gifted and had such an even temper and mind for business that, at the death of the actual firstborn Montgolfier, Raymond, Etienne was put in charge of the family business, skipping 13 elder siblings. Joseph Montgolfier, unlike his brothers, was a dreamer.
Therese and Joseph Montgolfier's marriage certificate:
One more note of interest on the Montgolfier brothers. A simple Google search will tell you that the brothers weren't married, but Joseph Michel was actually married to Thérèse Filhol de Montgolfier. The fascinating thing about Therese is that the July 11, 1845 edition of the Liverpool Mercury newspaper reports the death of Madame Montgolfier, the widow of Joseph, and lists her age as 111!!
Multiple sources confirm this, including the November 22, 1841 Hampshire Telegraph and Navy Chronicle which states that a healthy and hearty Madame Montgolfier - Aeronaut widow - was able to walk across a new bridge on the Seine with ease despite being 107 years old.
Similarly, the June 15 1843, London Chronicle confirmed her age as 110, a little over a year before she died:
What makes this interesting - interesting enough for the podcast, but of no bearing on our human-powered flight story - is that scholars generally accept Geert Adriaans Boomgaard, 1788-1899, as the first supercentenarian - a person who lives to be 110. (Only about 1 in 1000 centenarians - 100 year olds - live to be 110!) But if these British newspapers are correct, then Madame Montgolfier achieved supercentenarian status before Geert Boomgaard.
Some sources online credit Madame Montgolfier as being the inspiration for human powered flight, as the story, which dates back to at least 1910 goes, she was drying her petticoats above a fire one day and, noticing the billowing effect of the rising heat on her underclothing, she called in her husband to have a look, whereby he had something of a eureka moment. Science historian Charles Colston Gillispie tells a different story in his account of the Montgolfier's and the history of flying, writing, "One evening in November 1782, by his own account,
he was idly contemplating a print on the
wall of his sitting room depicting the long siege
of Gibraltar. From the time of the Spanish entry
into the war of American independence in 1779
until the peace negotiations of 1783, the fortress
was invested by Spanish forces. In vain. Impregnable
by land, impregnable by sea—might
not Gibraltar be taken from the air? The evenings
were growing cool in Avignon. A fire burned in
the grate. Surely the force that carried particles
of smoke up the flue could be confined and harnessed
to lift conveyances and float men above
the surface of the earth.
Such was the story told by Joseph in much
later years to a friend, the philosopher Joseph
Degerando, who incorporated it in a funeral
oration. It is not inherently implausible, and
there is independent and contemporary evidence."
Gillispie further describes Joseph Montgolfier as an absent minded professor of sort - the kind who would leave his wife behind at one location, while travelling by himself to another place. Gillispie writes, "Joseph was trying his hand all the while at various schemes, insulated by a certain distance from his own father's dismay at his rash borrowing and lending. For he was always having to be rescued from creditors by his father, by his Uncle
Jacques in Paris, or by his brothers. He had little
of what normally passes for self-discipline, but
little anger either, and though he might and did
rebel, he never lost his temper. He learned by
ear and eye, by hand and thought. He was always
trying the tools in the factory, taking machines
apart and putting them together better, making
his own furnaces, "and torturing various substances
with fire in order to acquire knowledge
of them…Joseph had a fine memory. After two or three
hearings or readings, he would repeat entire songs
and recite long poems by Voltaire. He was hopeless,
however, in a conversation or discussion,
following his fancy wherever it strayed instead of
sticking to the point. His father tried, nevertheless,
to do right by this wayward son, and put
him into school, first in Annonay, and when that
failed, in the Jesuit college at Tournon. The establishment
was a famous one, and all its rules
and priestly ways drove the boy to active rebellion.
When he was twelve or thirteen, he ran off
down the Rhone to the Mediterranean and freedom."
From: Gillispie, C. C. The Montgolfier brothers and the invention of aviation 1783–1784, pp. 10-11.
So the history of flight began with an absent-minded, dreamer of a young man, who invented the first flying machine while day-dreaming about being a soldier and conquering what was then thought to be an impregnable fortress. Clever and creative as he was, Montgolfier may not have been an Einstein-level scientific genius, as he credited the smoke of the fire - rather than the actual mechanism of the heat from the fire reducing the density of the air in a balloon. As I understand it, a hot air balloon works by using heat to reduce the density of the air inside the balloon, making it lighter than the surrounding cooler air. This difference in density creates buoyancy, causing the balloon to rise. When the air inside is heated, the air molecules move faster and spread out, taking up more space and reducing the overall density. This less dense, hotter air is then buoyed upwards by the denser, cooler air outside the balloon, causing it to float. So buoyancy, the upward force exerted by a fluid or gas that opposes the weight of an immersed object, causes the balloon to fly, not smoke. This will become important when we get to the meat of our story, which is about some bold but wacky aeronauts that turned their lawn chairs into spacecraft…or something like that.
So in 1782, Joseph Montgolfier built a 3 foot by 3 foot box that he covered with lightweight cloth. Then he lit a fire under the box, and it shot up to the ceiling, causing an excitied Joseph to write to his brother Etienne to secure lots of cloth and cordage. The two brothers built a much larger levitating box that used wool and hay for fuel, and this one travelled over a mile! Which makes for a great trivia question…what powered the first long distance aircraft created by humans? Wool and hay!
In 1783, the brothers constructed a balloon out of sackcloth that could hold 28,000 cubic feet of air, was held together by 1800 buttons, and weighed nearly 500 pounds. By early summer, they were ready to demonstrate their invention to the public. Once again, their contraption travelled over a mile, but this time, it rose to a height of over 5200 feet, though no cargo - human or otherwise - was carried. Things were getting serious, and the brothers were ready to put themselves in their balloon, but the king wasn't ready for that, and many people thought that humans would not be able to breathe at such altitudes. The king suggested that criminals be used as test pilots, just in case they died, but the Montgolfier brothers instead used animals - a duck and rooster as controls, because they knew birds could survive flight, and a goat as the test subject, with the brothers reasoning that if the goat could survive the test flight, then so could they! In September of 1783, at the Versailles castle with Queen Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI watching, the Montgolfier balloon with its duck, rooster and goat pilots managed to go 2 miles at an altitude of 1500 feet….AND THEY LANDED SAFELY!
The King was impressed, so he allowed the brothers to build a balloon for humans, and they built this beautiful to look at strangely shaped hot air-balloon that was 75 feet tall, and 49 feet in diameter, capable of holding 60,000 cubic feet of air, which is just a little bit shy of the 65,000 or so cubic feet in the Oval Office of the U.S. President. By the way, you really need to see how beautiful this balloon was! You can go to our website, www.interestingpod.com to check out some pictures. It's weird looking in shape, but has some amazing colors and artwork, including several massive portraits of Louis XVI.
On October 15, 1783, Etienne Montgolfier became the first ever human to lift off of the earth in a human made, fuel powered vehicle, albeit one that was tethered to the ground for safety. He made it up to 75-80 feet above ground, and later that same day, the physicist Pilatre pee-lah-tru," de Rozier did the same.
A little more than a month later, Rozier and an army officer named D'arlandes became the first humans in world history to make a free flight in a human built, fuel powered vehicle, and they flew for 25 minutes, covering over 5.5 miles, and reaching a height of 3,000 feet above Paris. They could have flown further - maybe up to 20-25 miles, but, due to the Montgolfier's belief that smoke caused the balloon to float, the fire that heated the air that actually gave buoyancy to the balloon didn't burn clean fuel, and thus it shot out embers, and Rozier and D'arlandes constantly had to put out fires with sponges and even their coats, to keep the balloon from burning up.
After the pioneering Montgolfiers, balloon advancements became the rage. December 1783 saw Jacques Charles take his hydrogen-powered balloon up to 1.9 miles - Oh the humanity…and in June of 1784, Earth had its first female aeronaut, Elisabeth Thible of Lyon. Her first flight lasted 45 minutes, covered 2.5 miles, and rose up to almost one mile high. On landing, she wrenched her ankle, but mostly recovered, though she did die a little over a year later at 27, possibly becoming one of the first members of that dubious club. Interestingly, as her first balloon flight was leaving the ground, Thimble and her co-pilot Monsieur Fleurant sang an operatic duet together.
Eventually, the science caught up to ballooning, and scientists realized that it was the lift provided by buoyancy principles and heating air that caused a balloon to float, rather than smoke, and, for a time, hydrogen became the leading buoyancy provider for balloonists. As you might know, however, the 1935 Hindenburg Disaster changed all of that. The Hindenburg was a German airship or zeppelin - evolution of the balloon - that was in Manchester, New Jersey in May of 1937.
Hindenburg flying over New Jerseyu, May 6, 1937:
The Hindenburg was a beautiful airship - 800 feet long, and it carried 4,900,000 cubic feet of Hydrogen, or approximately 82 times more than the Montgolfier's first human-carrying balloon. It was a passenger ship, carrying around 50 passengers and 56 crew, and could literally cross the Atlantic ocean, though it took around 60 or so hours to do so. The Hindenburg had a dining room, a kitchen, passenger quarters, a lounge, and more. It was really an incredible way to fly. It was a Nazi propaganda vessel, designed to impress people around the world and make them more amenable to the ruling Nazi party in Germany.
The explosion of the Hindenburg was far from the first airship tragedy, and, surprisingly, it wasn't even the worst. There were dozens of airship incidents and crashes before Hindenburg, incuding the worst, which was the crash of the USS Akron, a blimp/airship that was LITERALLY a flying aircraft carrier - eat your heart out, S.H.I.E.L.D. Unfortunately, the Akron crashed in a thunderstorm, off the coast of New Jersey, in 1933, and 73 of 76 lost their lives in that horrid crash. 52 were killed in an airship crash in France in 1923, 48 killed in a British airship crash in 1930, and another 44 were killed in a 1921 crash over Hull, United Kingdom. The fifth worst airship crash, and far and away the most famous, was the Hindenburg disaster, and it was probably famous due to it being caught on film.
On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg was set to land - or dock - in Manchester New Jersey, and its approach was filmed by an early news crew. At 7pm, the Hindenburg prepared to land, but the wind was blowing the ship around a bit, and shifting directions. By 7:21, the ship had dropped about a ton of water from its stern to balance itself, and it released its mooring lines to the ground crew below, who were to connect them to a winch on the ground that would pull the airship in. Four minutes after, the fabric of the airship fluttered and witnesses reported seeing a blue flame, which may have been static electricity, or the elusive St. Elmo's Fire, which is a weather phenomenon where plasma is generated from a mast or the leading edge of a plane or other airborne vehicle. Within seconds, the entire Hindenburg was engulfed in flames - Hydrogen is EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE - and muffled detonations were heard. Unfortunately, at the precise time this happened, the cameraman who had been diligently filming that airship this whole time, decided to film the crew on the ground instead, and even though you can actually hear the muffled explosions on the film, the cameraman somehow failed to focus his lens on the ship for several seconds, only turning back when fire had engulfed the ship. This means that, to this day, people still debate the cause of the fire, and certainty is elusive. This is suspicious to me, and sabotage was an early speculation as to the cause of the disaster. Very likely, it was simply a case of using an unfortunately flammable fuel that was held in a relatively flimsy container that led to the disaster, possibly exacerbated by static electricity or St. Elmo's fire. That said, one wonders if some elements of the U.S., British, or French governments, sensing a growing Nazi storm, might not have thought about striking a preemptive blow against that wicked government. So - there you go, a Hindenburg conspiracy theory.
No matter the cause, many lives were lost, and it was horrific. The response of the U.S. military at the scene, however, was heroic, and Navy Chief Petty Officer Frederick J. "Bull" Tobin rallied his men in the face of the explosion, shouting, "Navy men, Stand fast!!" And those men did indeed stand fast, heroically rushing into danger to save whom they might.
Interestingly, journalist Herbert Morrison was there when the Hindenburg crashed, and he was doing a live radio broadcast, during the disaster. The recording survives today, and is often paired with some of the newsreel footage from the crash. As you might imagine, it is hard to listen to, because Morrison is overwhelmed with genuine emotion as he watches the tragedy unfold. From this broadcast, we get the famous phrase, "Oh, the humanity," which forms the title of this episode. Skip ahead a few seconds if you don't want to hear the narration.
HERBERT MORRISON NARRATION. It's practically standing still now they've dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship; and they've been taken ahold of down on the field by a number of men. It's starting to rain again; it's... the rain had slacked up a little bit. The back motors of the ship are just holding it just enough to keep it from...It's burst into flames! It burst into flames and it's falling, it's crashing! Watch it; watch it, folks get out of the way; Get out of the way; Get this, Charlie; get this, Charlie! It's fire... and it's crashing! It's crashing, terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It's burning and bursting into flames and the... and it's falling on the mooring mast and all the folks beneath it! This is terrible; this is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh it's... The flame's climbing! Oh, it's four or five hundred feet into the sky, and it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. There's smoke, and there's flames, now, and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here! I don't believe it! I can't even talk to people whose friends are on there! Ah! It's... it... it's a... ah! I... I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest: it's just laying there, a massive smoking wreckage. Ah! And everybody can hardly breathe and talk and the screaming. I... I... I'm sorry. Honest: I... I can hardly breathe. I... I'm going to step inside, where I cannot see it. Charlie, that's terrible. Ah, ah... I can't. Listen, folks; I... I'm gonna have to stop for a minute because I've lost my voice. This is the worst thing I've ever witnessed.
— Herbert Morrison, Transcription of WLS radio broadcast describing the Hindenburg disaster
Things changed with balloon and airship travel after the Hindenburg disaster, as one might expect. Blimps largely stopped using hydrogen due to widespread public fear and worry about the flammability of Hydrogen. Helium - an inert gas almost as light as hydrogen- became the new lifting gas for balloons and airships, and that remains to this day. Due to a geological fluke, the US has a monopoly on helium, and, unlike hydrogen, it is NOT abundant on the Earth, and we don't know how to create it chemically. Though Helium is abundant in the universe, humans lack the technology to obtain it from a distance, and current stocks are extremely limited.
But that hasn't stopped backyard aeronauts like Larry Walters, Kent Couch, Kevin Walsh, and a priest called Adelir Andonio De Carli to engage in the amazing and dangerous extreme sport of cluster-ballooning, which we will talk about on part two of this episode on the history of flight. To give you a little preview…Walters is the guy who put some giant helium balloons on his lawn chair, grabbed a pellet gun to shoot the balloons if he went too high, a cb radio, couple of sandwiches, a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and, of course, a six-pack of beer…and flew off into the distance. To be precise, 16,000 feet high and 8 miles away from San Pedro in Los Angeles to Long Beach. How did he do it? Why did he do it? And how did Priest de Carli fly even higher in 2008 - over 20,000 feet? Well, join us on the next episode - part two of Oh, the Humanity, to find out. In the meantime, please tell your friends and neighbors and any squatters that might be living on your property about the podcast. Word of mouth is important for new works like this one, and I'd appreciate you sharing the love! You can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share the show on social media. Thank you, and the second part of this episode should drop in a couple of days, so stay tuned.
— Herbert Morrison, Transcription of WLS radio broadcast describing the Hindenburg disaster
Things changed with balloon and airship travel after the Hindenburg disaster, as one might expect. Blimps largely stopped using hydrogen due to widespread public fear and worry about the flammability of Hydrogen. Helium - an inert gas almost as light as hydrogen- became the new lifting gas for balloons and airships, and that remains to this day. Due to a geological fluke, the US has a monopoly on helium, and, unlike hydrogen, it is NOT abundant on the Earth, and we don't know how to create it chemically. Though Helium is abundant in the universe, humans lack the technology to obtain it from a distance, and current stocks are extremely limited.
But that hasn't stopped backyard aeronauts like Larry Walters, Kent Couch, Kevin Walsh, and a priest called Adelir Andonio De Carli to engage in the amazing and dangerous extreme sport of cluster-ballooning, which we will talk about on part two of this episode on the history of flight. To give you a little preview…Walters is the guy who put some giant helium balloons on his lawn chair, grabbed a pellet gun to shoot the balloons if he went too high, a cb radio, couple of sandwiches, a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and, of course, a six-pack of beer…and flew off into the distance. To be precise, 16,000 feet high and 8 miles away from San Pedro in Los Angeles to Long Beach. How did he do it? Why did he do it? And how did Priest de Carli fly even higher in 2008 - over 20,000 feet? Well, join us on the next episode - part two of Oh, the Humanity, to find out. In the meantime, please tell your friends and neighbors and any squatters that might be living on your property about the podcast. Word of mouth is important for new works like this one, and I'd appreciate you sharing the love! You can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share the show on social media. Thank you, and the second part of this episode should drop in a couple of days, so stay tuned.
