Discover Top Posts Tagged with #balloos

Erika´s First Giant Blow - Trailer - LoonerClips.com

After Graduation, Chicago, 2012

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Balloon steered by magnet

We stay in topic of the balloons. In the first years of the ballooning, one of the serious problems was steering the aerostat, because, as it's commonly known, a balloon has neither propulsion, nor steering device. There were lots of different attempts to solve this problem, but most of them failed.

One idea came from a polish poet and royal chamberlain, Stanisław Trembecki (1739-1812), who came up with a brilliant idea to steer a balloon with a magnet. How did he visualize it? Now, in his project there was an iron plate attached to the surface of a balloon and a magnet at the end of an arm, sticking out of the basket. A proper magnet would pull a balloon in the desired direction. You can see it in his project:

Trembecki introduced his project to the king Stanisław August Poniatowski, who not only got interested in this idea, but also sent it to scientific academies in Berlin and Petersburg. Unsurprisingly, he didn't receive positive response. The whole idea was of course ridiculous, because you can't expect to pull yourself with magnet attached to you. It would be something like pulling yourself up by your hair, but unfortunately only baron Münchausen can do this. The idea of Trembecki proves him poorly educated and shallow thinking, but unluckily the same applies to the king. In the polish version of this article I would end at this point, but as you may not be familiar with polish Enlightenment, I've got to explain some things. First of all, the case of Trembecki may sound comical, but he was an example of a mind that tried to be progressive and serve his country with inventions, even if he didn't have any intellectual base. Such was the polish Enlightenment. Fortunately, that period gave birth to authentic polish 'savants' that were respected among their European colleagues, not to mention Jan Śniadecki (1756-1830), who was one of the first to carry out experiments with real balloons. But I will tell more about him later. Source: I. Z. Siemion, O polskich osiemnastowiecznych próbach balonowych, „Wiadomości Chemiczne”, 2009, nr 63, s. 713.

#balloos #history of science #enlightenment #poland