The History of Hot Air Ballooning
A brief history of ballooning
The basic idea behind hot air balloons has been around for a long time. Archimedes,
one of the greatest mathematicians in Ancient Greece, put forward the principle
of buoyancy more than 2,000 years ago, and may have conceived of flying machines
lifted by the force. Jim Woodman believes that triangular hot air balloons
may have been used by the Nazca Indians of Peru some 1500 years ago as a tool
for designing vast earth drawings on the Nazca plain.
More certain is that in the 13th century the English scientist Roger Bacon
proposed hypothetical flying machines based on the principle. However, it was
only in the late 18th century that man started to turn theory into reality.
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