標準歴史・文化

The Montgolfier Brothers

📄 本文

下線の語句をクリックすると意味が表示され、収録語はワンクリックでマイ単語帳に登録できます。

Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier were born in the 1740s in the town of Annonay in southern France. They were two of the sixteen children of a family that owned a paper . Joseph, the older brother, was an imaginative dreamer who was fascinated by but had little interest in running a business. Étienne, on the other , was and organized, so their father chose him to the family company. Although their lives were very different, the brothers shared a strong curiosity about how things worked. According to a well-known story, Joseph got his first idea while watching a one evening in 1782. Noticing that smoke and small pieces of burnt paper rose into the air, he wondered whether this could something larger. He made a small box from thin wood and silk, held it over a , and watched it up to the . Excited, he wrote to Étienne, and the brothers began working together. Because their family made paper, they had easy to the materials they needed for larger balloons. In June 1783, the brothers showed a large balloon made of cloth and paper to the people of Annonay. It rose high into the sky and landed about two kilometers away. News of the event reached Paris, and in September, they were invited to give a demonstration for King Louis XVI. Since no one knew whether a living could at such heights, they sent a sheep, a duck, and a rooster into the air first. The animals landed safely after about eight minutes, and two months later, two men made the first free in a balloon over Paris. Interestingly, the brothers did not fully understand the behind their . They believed that the smoke itself contained a special gas, but it was the hot air that made the balloon . Even so, their changed the way people thought about the sky. For the first time, humans could above the ground and look down on the world from the air. Today, hot-air balloons are still called montgolfières in French, and the brothers' experiments are remembered as the beginning of human .