the.com/balloons
defying gravity is easy when you're mostly nothing held together by hope.
means Balloons are flexible bags, usually rubber or shiny foil, inflated with air or a lighter-than-air gas like helium to float, decorate, or delight.
from From the Italian 'ballone,' a big ball — an augmentative of 'balla,' meaning ball or bale, a cousin of words for round, bundled things across the Germanic and Romance families. The word ballooned into English in the late 16th century for a large inflated game ball, then drifted upward with the 18th-century craze for hot-air and hydrogen flight, when the Montgolfiers and their rivals sent the first ones aloft and gave the word its airborne fame.
- first flight
- 1783's first passengers were a sheep, duck, and rooster
- latex source
- made from sap of the rubber tree
- pop physics
- they burst faster than the speed of sound
- helium escape
- tiny atoms leak right through the rubber walls
- world record
- a cluster-balloon flight reached over 18,000 feet
hindenburg — german passenger airship that caught fire in 1937, killing 35 of 97 people on board
balloon boy hoax — 2009 incident where parents claimed their son was in a homemade balloon over colorado
steve fossett balloon — circumnavigated earth in 2002 in a hot air balloon
maxim balloon crossing — andre-louis jamet and bertrand piccard crossed atlantic in 1992