{"id":17097,"date":"2016-06-04T11:14:31","date_gmt":"2016-06-04T15:14:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=17097"},"modified":"2016-06-04T11:50:08","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T15:50:08","slug":"the-progress-how-she-is-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2016\/06\/04\/the-progress-how-she-is-made\/","title":{"rendered":"The progress, how she is made"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"First<\/a>

First public demonstration of a hot air balloon in Annonay, France, June 4, 1783. Detail from a set of cards “The Dream of Flight,” Library of Congress<\/a>, public domain<\/p><\/div>\n

Two hundred thirty-three years ago today, the Montgolfier brothers made the first public demonstration of their invention, the hot air balloon. Just as with the first space flights, the first balloon flights were unmanned, and though humans would begin to take flight within the year, test animals–in this case a duck, a rooster and a sheep–would precede the first human, and the first man would be launched before the first woman. That honor fell to \u00c9lisabeth Thible who, dressed as the Goddess Minerva, sang opera from the precincts of the air on this day in 1784. This was, after all, France.<\/p>\n

But just as the German scientist Werner von Braun, designer of the rockets of the early space program, first built the V-2 war rocket that devastated parts of London during WWII, the Montgolfier brothers had military applications in mind, too.<\/p>\n

As the story goes, Joseph Montgolfier was gazing into a fire one night in 1782 in Avignon, watching embers rise in the smoke. He theorized that the smoke contained a gas (which he modestly named Montgolfier Gas), and that gas possessed a quality to lift objects upward, (which, funnily enough, he dubbed “levity”). His first practical thought was how this quality could be used to lift troops for an aerial assault on the unscalable heights of the British fortress of Gibraltar. Inventors apparently had a thing for attacking the British.<\/p>\n

It’s amazing to me how often the animating force behind scientific progress is actual animosity. This message itself comes to you via the Internet, whose genesis as DARPANet in the 1960s was a distributed network of computers that could maintain communications no matter how many of its individual units were destroyed in nuclear Armageddon.<\/p>\n

Think how different the world might be if the Montgolfiers had invented the balloon simply because Joseph looked into the fire one night and had a vision of a diva dressed as a goddess singing from the air above an admiring crowd of Parisians, or if the Internet was born out of an overpowering desire to share cat videos. In the end, though, maybe no difference at all. Von Braun dreamed of flying to the moon long before he built the first V-2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two hundred thirty-three years ago today, the Montgolfier brothers made the first public demonstration of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17097"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17102,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17097\/revisions\/17102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}