FACTORALY - E58 Balloons

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Everyone loves a balloon, right? Well, most people, anyway. This inflated story of the party favourite is floating about and popping with facts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello simon hello bruce how are you today i'm feeling fabulous thank you very much how are you not too shabby thank you very good very good hello everyone yes hello people hello everyone at home or in your car or at work or walking your dog or wherever wherever shall we tell people quickly what this is where we are why we're doing this and all that stuff i mean it would help me to remember as well yeah so who are we you're you're simon wells right yes that's me and you you're Bruce Fielding? Close. That'll do. Good.

We'll go with that then. This is Factorily, which you know because you clicked on the link. Yep. What is Factorily, Simon? Factorily is a wondrous place full of useful knowledge and entertainment. It is, isn't it? Otherwise, it's a weekly podcast um two nerds chatting about random stuff what do we do as a day job uh we are two nerds who chat about random stuff

yeah i mean i guess that's what we do for a living as well so it can it's kind of close isn't it yeah we are both professional voiceover artists we read things and we say things we do um advertising campaigns we read audiobooks we do well bruce has a wonderful line in um technical manuals that's true yes um and then when we're not doing that we we come along here we have a i like to think of this as a virtual chat down the pub kind of scenario yeah we're two blokes who go, have you ever wondered how this thing works? Or did you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Two blokes who monopolize the conversation and you can't get a word in edgeways. Yes. But you're doing that voluntarily by listening to us. So more fool you.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. So today's podcast, Simon, what are we going to talk about today? Today we are going to be talking about balloons. Balloons, you say. Do you like balloons? I like a balloon. I'm rather partial. I'm not a globophobe. Oh, what's a globophobe? A brand new word that I discovered. Globophobia is a fear of balloons. Ah.

So, yes, apparently there are a reasonable number of people who suffer from globophobia who are scared. Do you know why that is? I believe it's the uncertainty of whether or not it's about to pop. Yes. And when it does pop, it's the noise. It's the noise. The sudden noise, yes. The breaking the sound barrier. Oh. It's like the crack of a whip. Right. OK. Yes. So the crack of a whip is basically the end of the tip of the whip breaking the sound barrier. Oh. It's like the crack of a whip. Right. Okay. Yes.

So the crack of a whip is basically the end of the tip of the whip breaking the sound barrier. And similarly, when the air escapes from a balloon, once it's been popped, the air is going faster than sound. Oh, I see. So that's why it makes a pop noise because it's actually making the noise of breaking the sound barrier. Whereas an underinflated balloon, when you pop it, it doesn't so much pop as it just exhales yes wonderful i mean the thing that people are often scared of

with balloons which will probably come on to later is balloon animals or the people the people who who make and design balloon animals it's probably more to the point rather than the actual animals themselves sure and that squeaky noise yeah i'm not a major fan of the squeaky noise but i i'm okay enough with it that i can i can hold a balloon and make that noise in order to irritate people who are so when were balloons first a thing simon it depends who you ask um i spent way too much of a proportion of my research time trying to answer this very question and i couldn't find a definitive answer it really annoyed me um most of the things we research seem to go back to sort of 3000 bc in china yes or the ancient egyptians yes uh balloons don't oh i found i found one single source on the whole of

the internet that said there was a roman engineer called frontinius who once had a dream in which the god vulcan showed him a picture of a large cotton bag inflated with air by a fire hanging underneath the cloth yeah and he woke up and he went and built it and he created this cloth bag and he put a basket underneath and he put a little bronze dish in there with a fire and he created the first hot air balloon all right i found that written in one single website and nowhere else okay and therefore i can't quite decide whether it's true or not because i can't find any other evidence for it i found that the aztecs had balloons really go on they used the intestines of animals okay yes it's like

basically blowing up a bladder great for what purpose i have no idea just funsies hitting people over the head attach it to a stick and hit people i don't know i have no idea what they did with it right okay well they may have done it then. Officially, if we sort of look at resources that can be actually historically relied upon, Galileo certainly did stuff with inflated pig's bladders to measure the weight of air. Okay. So he measured the weight of a pig's bladder,

then he inflated a pig's bladder, measured it again, that gives you the weight of air. Oh, right, okay. In Galileo's mind so he he kind of used balloons in that respect however long ago galileo was so that's that's the first official record i could find then we sort of skip several hundred years. Problem is, there are lots of different types of balloons.

So if we're looking at sort of rubber-inflated spherical objects that feel balloonish, similar to party balloons, that goes back to 1824 and Michael Faraday. The electric man. The electric man the electric man him he uh he actually created something that that was effectively a rubber balloon he took two sheets of rubber he glued the edges together he inflated it with gas and he did various experiments with with different types of gases to see you know how heavy or light they were whether they would fall rise how quickly they would expand etc um so him definitely in the rubber balloon area that's a hard word to say just the bubba bit in the middle rubber balloon

it's quite enjoyable isn't it what about if you rub a rubber balloon then you'd be a rubber balloon rubber then you get static yes you would which is probably something that faraday was quite interested i think he probably was because that kind of guy yes but other balloons um hot air balloons go back even longer ago than that to um 1783 it shows the the the speed of human endeavor. Yes. That in 1785, two years later, there was a cross-channel attempt in a hot air balloon. Yeah. Only two years after the first flight. Only two years. It was a Frenchman called Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who was financed by an American guy called Dr. John Jeffries.

And they decided to go and see if they could cross the channel in a balloon. And as they started off in a hot air balloon, they realized that they didn't quite have the amount of hot air that they needed to maintain height. Right. So they started to empty the contents of the balloon into the channel,

about two-thirds of the way across. Oh, and also I should mention that Jean-Pierre Blanchard couldn't swim. Oh, crikey. That's a bit of a risk, isn't it? So although he was happy to go in the air, he couldn't actually swim. So when they landed, they were basically wearing their underpants and a life jacket each. Oh, because they'd thrown all their clothes overboard to lighten the load. Yeah.

Fantastic. Yeah, that was on January the 7th, 1785. That is pretty quick then isn't it so in in 1783 the mongolfier brothers they were experimenting with with balloons and this sort of large bag that you inflate with hot air and therefore it rises um their first test of this thing well they'd done a few tests they'd sort of had a couple of tethered balloons they'd you tried this and tried that. The first live test subject to go in a hot air balloon was in the September of 1783.

And they put a sheep, a duck and a chicken into a wicker basket suspended from a balloon by ropes. The sheep had a name. Did it? Yeah. It was called Montauciel.

Montauciel means climb to the sky in French. Oh, that's gorgeous. How lovely. But Montgolfier was inspired by laundry. Right. He saw laundry drying over fire and ash. Yeah.

And he thought that what they were doing was they were emitting a special gas. Oh, okay. Which he called levity. Levity. Yes. Levvity. Yes. Levitate. Yes. Or Montgolfier gas as well.

I mean, he thought, hmm, maybe I should name it after me. Yeah, far better. Far better. So he thought that fires produced a particular gas rather than just heating up air. Yes. Right.

But they're notoriously unstable, these hot air balloons. Yeah. You can't steer one, can you? No, you have to kind of rely on the wind. Yeah. 1785 was the first hot air balloon disaster. Not the one that crossed the Channel?

No, not the one that crossed the Channel. This was another one. I think it was in Ireland. And it was in May 1785 in the town of Tullamore. Somebody was taking up their hot air balloon and it crashed into a village and burned down 100 houses. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. Imagine putting that on the insurance claim. House damage due to hot air balloon failure. Yes. Crikey. Yeah, they're quite something I've always been quite fascinated with hot air balloons that they because they can't steer I've always wondered do they know where they're going to land do they know how long they're going to be airborne how well can they control you know are they just going to end up landing in some poor

farmer's field what happens if they overshoot a field do they just land to end up landing in some poor farmer's field? What happens if they overshoot a field? Do they just land in a town, etc.? But they can not steer as such, but because the jets of fire heating up the air in the balloon make the balloon rise, there's also a vent in the top of the canopy of the balloon that you can briefly open to let some of that air out. So you can totally control the vertical axis of the balloon

and if you've done enough research if you know what the weather's doing if you know where the different air streams are you can go up a bit to catch an air stream that's going one way or down a bit to catch one that's going the other way yes um i don't know how reliable that is i i've read that um ballooners sort of take real interest in weather reports. They communicate local weather stations and things like that. Sometimes they let off a handful of small helium balloons into the air and just see where they go. So they can spot, oh, well, there's a westerly bit up there or there's an easterly bit down there. But yes, I've always thought that

might be a bit precarious that you're sort of beginning to run out of gas you've suddenly caught a jet of air going the wrong way and you're looking over the edge of the basket going um that was our field guys it's gone i i once had for quite some time um a voucher to go on a hot air ballooning experience oh and every time i rang them up they said oh the weather's not right today oh yes and after about two years of the weather's not right today i gave up oh so have you ever been in a hot air balloon i never have i ever oh so you know i have um only a tethered one but still i was on holiday in america and this was a town called branson in missouri and they had a tethered hot air balloon which just went up and down within

this sort of um cage metal cage okay um the whole ride took about 10 minutes you went up you went oh nice view and then it came down again with the chap telling you a bit of the history and this particular balloon actually started off um in paris in the early 1900s um as a sort of a visitor attraction tethered to the eiffel tower yeah can't remember how it ended up in missouri but so it did uh and that's the hot air balloon that i've been in what was the what was the basket made from don't remember i'm gonna guess wicker ah yeah because they're often made of woven rattan all right okay i pronounce it rattan do you pronounce it rattan or rattan i go in between i go rattan i pronounce both syllables fair enough um and generally the floors are made of plywood okay um but there's one balloon that's got a glass floor oh really cool yeah reinforced glass nice and there are some some older balloons have

gondola they're called gondolas the basket by the way are they yeah yeah and they're made of aluminium fiberglass all sorts of different things right okay but traditionally you would make it out of a picnic basket yes i i sort of picture that i picture um as a as a kid i used to love this stop motion animated series of Wind in the Willows. And there was an episode where Toad, on one of his fads, goes and buys a hot air balloon. And he's struggling to climb into it. And it's making this wonderful, creaky, picnic basket-y noise as he gets into this balloon. That's exactly what I picture them being made of.

I mean, you mentioned going up and down to look at things um the military used hot air balloons as well in water oh for sort of map making and well for observing the enemy yeah so you'd send somebody i mean the chinese used kites to send people up but you know more modern thing was to put an observer with a pair of binoculars in a in a balloon send them up because they're out of range sure and uh and do it that way huh the other type of balloon that is used in military terms i say the other there are probably several um barrage balloons oh yes i had a quick look at barrage balloons and um again sort of from from watching you know classic old wartime movies you see these blimp like structures up in the sky quite a lot of them and i never really questioned what they were i don't i don't think i thought they were zeppelins or anything like that, but they were barrage balloons. So this happened on both sides of the war.

You have these huge balloons tethered by steel cables, and you send these things up to a certain height. They first came around in the First World War and went up to a height of about 15,000 feet. And you have all of these balloons dotted around the sky, and they all have these steel cables suspended from them. Some of the cables are interwoven into a net formation, and it just interrupts enemy aircraft. It either gets in the way so that they can't dive bomb at low level, or it forces them to go further up above the barrage balloons, which is a better range to shoot at them with your anti-aircraft artillery. And I was quite surprised how big these things were, because, you know, only sort of seeing them on video footage

and they're quite a long way away, they look quite small. But some of these balloons could reach about 64 feet in length. Wow. That's like three cricket pitches. So they're quite big, and they have these enormously heavy steel cables hanging off them so if a plane were to crash into one of those it would jolly well know about it there are a couple of zeppelin um hangars by bedford autodrome yes that's right there are aren't they? They are amazingly huge things. Yeah, yeah. One of these hangers is so big that it has its own weather system.

It actually has small clouds condensing in the roof of this hangar. A bit like the thing in NASA that we talked about. Oh, yes, of course we did. Yeah, excellent. But yes, by the time World War II came along, we had, in this country at least, we had 1,400 of these barrage balloons dotted around the country, a third of which were flying over London. So they tethered them in strategic places, you know, key cities or industrial areas, ports, harbours, things that we didn't want the enemy to get a good shot at. Weren't there, I think in the First World War,

the Germans sent over Zeppelins with bombs? Yes, they did. And a lot of London was bombed by Zeppelin. By Zeppelin, yeah. Yeah. That's a balloon. That's a balloon, kind of. Interestingly, I recognise the fact

that the cabin under a Zeppelin is called a gondola. I hadn't realised that that would have applied to hot air balloons as well. Makes sense. There you go. So we talked about the first hot air balloons as well. Makes sense. There you go. So we talked about the first hot air balloon going up in 1783. Yep.

And of course, two years later, they're flying across the Channel. It seems natural. Which seems natural. But also, a few years later, they're deciding to use it for fighting duels. OK. I'm not familiar with this.

Tell me more. So by 1808, two gentlemen, one called de Grandpré and one called Lepic, they fought a duel over Paris from balloons. And it was basically over a woman,

of course, Mademoiselle Thirvy. And Lepic lost because his balloon was shot and he died in the crash i was just about to say i mean unless the balloons are very close together and you can have a basket to basket sword fight presumably we're talking about pistols here yes the idea just to shoot each other's balloon down yes that's i mean i know that firearms weren't incredibly accurate back then by comparison to today's standards,

but a balloon is quite big, is it not? Surely that would be quite an easy thing to hit. I'm not sure they started off that big. I mean, if you look at the Montgolfier brothers' balloons, they weren't huge. Weren't they? No, not by the drawings. Obviously, there were no photographs. True, yeah, true.

But by the drawings, they didn't seem to be enormously large. Right. I suppose I picture these massive, colourful hot air balloons that you get these days with Virgin written all over them. Yes. They're whopping great things, aren't they? They are huge. Talking of those Virgin balloons, there was one that broke the record, wasn't there? Do you remember back in 2012? Yeah, we had the Olympics going on, didn't we?

We did, but there was a manned balloon flight. Right. A chap called Felix Baumgartner. Good name. Had a Virgin logo on the thing. He had a parachute with him because obviously as the balloons go up, the gas inside them expands and eventually they explode. Oh, really? Yeah.

Right. So he went up to a height of, I tell you what, why not? Have a guess. Oh, crikey. October 14th, 2012. Gas balloon. 5,000 feet. Tiny bit further.

10,000 feet. Try kilometres. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. um 5 000 feet tiny bit further 10 000 feet try try kilometers oh really oh yeah oh um well how far away is space um i don't know 10 kilometers further 20 further 30 tiny bit further go on put me out of my misery okay 39.045 kilometers that's really high that's very very very very high i mean by my maths that's really high that's on the edge of space isn't it pretty much is crikey 39 kilometers wow and he did... That was in a gas balloon. Right. And he did that just for funsies, because he could... I think he did it because Richard Branson paid for him. Yes, that's a good reason. So, moving on to the kind of balloons that Michael Faraday was making, the artificial manufactured rubber, stroke, latex, stroke, whatever they are made of type balloons.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they're lovely. They're fun, aren't they? They are really nice. I really hope that once Michael Faraday inflated his first balloon with some gas, I really hope that the first thing he did was sort of bounce it around on his head and play with it and see how long he could keep it off the floor and so on. Yeah.

Well, I mean, normally these days what they do is they fill those balloons, to make them float. Yes. They fill them with helium. Yes. They started off with hydrogen, but obviously hydrogen is a bit more dangerous because it catches fire. I can imagine that's probably not a good thing.

Sets fires villages. Children's birthday party where there are cakes with candles involved. That's true. That's true. But we're talking about people going up into the air in a balloon. There's a chap called Ian Ashpole. Okay. Who is slightly odd.

And he went 10,000 feet into the air. Right. By having 635-inch helium balloons. Wow. And a parachute. Because, like I said, as you get higher, the gas expands. Yes, and eventually it will pop. And they will pop.

And basically, he said it sounded like a machine gun going off when some of these 600 helium balloons started to burst because all at the same time, all to the same pressure. It's like the movie Up, isn't it? It's exactly like Up, except with a person rather than a house and and um yeah so so he had a parachute so so when he got up to um up to 10 000 feet and they all popped he sort of popped off wow well what a brave slash crazy fella i mean there is a famous story of somebody going up do you remember the chap who went up using weather balloons?

I vaguely remember it. I couldn't tell you much in terms of detail. So, yes, there was a famous American who went up into the air in a sort of a deck chair. And a whole load, do you remember? Yeah, that rings a bell. And a whole load of helium weather balloons attached to his chair. He had 45 helium balloons attached to a lawn chair. And he just wanted to go up to 30 feet just to have a look at the...

Basically to get more sunlight was his idea. Went a bit further than 30 feet. Went up to three miles. Oh, good grief. Oh, that's a bit of an overshoot, isn't it? In a lawn chair with 45 helium balloons. He had taken a gun with him so the idea was that he would

shoot the balloons slowly so that he could actually descend gradually. But he was so drunk. Oh, good grief. Just gets better. He basically fortified himself with beer to do the thing and he couldn't get the gun to work.

So he just kept on going up until they popped and then he starts to come down i mean so long as they don't all pop at once then that's kind of okay i guess yes yes he he survived that good for him apparently a helium balloon needs to be bigger than five inches. Does it? Because the amount of helium you can get into a balloon that's less than five inches won't lift the latex off the ground. I see. OK. A 10-inch balloon is enough for about six hours. OK. A 12-inch balloon can fly 12 hours.

And actually, in cold weather, they last a lot longer. Do they? Hmm. Why is that? It's because helium expands in heat. Yes, okay. And the molecules are quite small so the molecules of helium actually escape

through the skin of the balloon. Oh, I see, okay. Whereas on a cold day they don't expand so much. Huh. I'll put a link to this video up on the wonderful website factorally.com

factorally.com That's the one. there was a chap who was uh doing an experiment with a balloon to see if he could make it sort of stay in one position at height so he he had a helium filled balloon with a piece of string on the end and he just trimmed the string until the weight of the string was equal to the buoyancy of the balloon and therefore the balloon just stayed where it was. If he lifted it up and let go, it just stayed there. And then he used the static that you get when you put your hand near a balloon.

And because the balloon was just free to drift, not going up or down, but it was attracted to the static on this fella's hand, he was just sort of guiding the balloon around as if he were using the force. It was quite a visual treat. So I'll post that up on the website. That's fun to see. Yeah, absolutely. Do you know how many party balloons are sold each year?

I don't. I couldn't find UK figures for some reason. Don't know why. In the US, around 3 billion party balloons are sold each year. When you say party balloons, you don't mean the ones with numbers on. You actually mean just ordinary balloons. Balloons in general, whether that's birthday balloons, helium filled, just a pack of sad little rubber balloons that you have to blow up.

Novelty balloons, decorational balloons. Those kind of things is what I'm talking about. Goodness. The global market for party balloons in 2021 was worth $1.5 billion. That's a lot of balloons. That is a lot of balloons. Isn't it?

So Andrew Dahl, who's just an ordinary guy, American. He inflated 23 balloons with his nose in three minutes. Gosh. That's... Which is impressive. It's odd. It's very odd. I'd be afraid of what else you were blowing into the balloon.

Yes. There's another chap from China called Zhang Shang who had learned how to inflate balloons with his ear. How slash why? Well, you know, ear, nose and throat is all connected, right? Yeah. So he just basically used his ear rather than his nose or his throat. Or his mouth.

I mean, it's not going to be the most efficient way of doing it, is it? No, not really. There's a chap called Larry Moss, an American sculptor who sculpted balloons. Oh, right. And he's made unique copies of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, all using balloons. And he calls it origami. Origami, that's great and he's also

designed a collection of balloon clothes oh really yeah oh great There's a lot of world records

for balloon sculpting and things yes I would imagine yes it seems like one of those topics doesn't it it does I mean there's a chap who uh john cassidy in 1999 john cassidy broke the world record for sculpting balloon animals creating 749 in one hour oh crikey wow i mean he could cheat by making every single one of them a caterpillar, i.e. just a blown up oblong balloon. Yeah. This one's an eel. This one's a snake. This one's a caterpillar.

Fantastic. No, no. Generally, what's allowed as a balloon animal is something that looks like a dog. Yes. That's quite typical, isn't it? Yeah. I found a record on a similar line, the largest modeling balloon sculpture by an individual, not by a group, because that would be even bigger. This thing measures 21.91 meters. Wow. So quite big. This was achieved by David Baker in the US in 2015. And he created this sculpture of a bat

hanging upside down, made out of modelling balloons. They make quite big sculptures as well out of them. I mean, I've seen full-sized dinosaurs. Yes, I've seen those as well. Made out of balloons. Yeah. That's quite impressive.

People do have some spare time on their hands, don't they? They do, don't they? They do, don't they? So, we've talked about balloons on Earth, but balloons are used in space as well. Or not just in space, on other planets. Are they? So, the Russian space probes, Vega 1 and Vega 2, used helium

balloons to drop scientific instruments into the atmosphere of venus in 1985 gosh so they've been going up for a while right i'd never really thought of that i suppose once the floatiness gosh that's not a very scientific word is it once once the floatiness of the balloon gets you up as far as the atmosphere then the weightlessness of space will take you the rest of the way that's probably quite a fuel-efficient way of doing it, I suppose. That's true. That's true. I'm talking of science.

Medical science as well uses balloons. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you've ever had a relative or somebody that you know who's had some sort of artery problem. No. So they do a thing called ballooning or angioplasty. Okay. Which is basically, you can do it two ways.

You can either just put a balloon in and then open up the artery to sort of, if it's got a bit clogged. Yes. Put a balloon in and that sort of opens it up a bit. Right. Or you can attach a stent to a balloon, like a very skinny balloon. And you basically put it in, then blow up the balloon and the stent expands to increase the volume of the artery i see and then they withdraw the balloon yes then they withdraw the balloon leaving the stent in place how clever very very clever stuff well i'm feeling a bit deflated now because i've

run out of things to say yeah me too i too. I've got no more ballooning facts. So we need to tell people three things. You're probably at a point now where you're going, I've given you a five-star review. I've told the world that you've got a good podcast. I don't need to do it again. Yes, you do. You need to do it every single time for every single podcast. Just give us a five-star review.

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