Balloon, large airtight bag filled with hot air or a lighter-than-air gas, such as helium or hydrogen, to provide buoyancy so that it will rise and float in the atmosphere. Transport balloons have a basket or container hung below for passengers or cargo. A self-propelled, steerable balloon is called an airship, or dirigible.
Balloons were used in the first successful human attempts at flying. Experimentation with balloonlike craft may have begun as early as 1709 with the work of Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Brazilian priest and inventor. In 1783 Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier at Annonay, Fr., confirmed that a fabric bag filled with hot air would rise. On June 4 of that year they launched an unmanned balloon that traveled more than 1.5 miles (2.4 km). At Versailles, they repeated the experiment with a larger balloon on Sept. 19, 1783, sending a sheep, rooster, and duck aloft.
On Nov. 21, 1783, the first manned flight took place when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes, sailed over Paris in a Montgolfier balloon. They burned wool and straw to keep the air in the balloon hot; their flight covered 5.5 miles (almost 9 km) in about 23 minutes. In December of that year the physicist J.-A.-C. Charles, accompanied by Nicolas-Louis Robert, flew a balloon filled with hydrogen on a two-hour flight.
Military uses for balloons were soon developed. Anchored observation balloons were used by Napoleon in some of his battles and by both sides in the American Civil War and in World War I. The powered airship developed from balloons, but, while the airship was eventually supplanted by the airplane, balloons have continued to find useful applications. During World War II, balloons were anchored over many parts of Britain to defend against low-level bombing or dive-bombing.
Balloons have also proved enormously valuable to science. As early as 1911–12, V.F. Hess, an Austrian physicist, made a daring series of balloon ascensions as high as 5,000 m (about 3 miles) to prove the existence of cosmic rays. Advances in weather science since 1900 have resulted in great part from intensive exploration of the upper air by instrumented free balloons, which have risen to an altitude of 30 km (19 miles). Auguste Piccard, Swiss physicist and educator, set a world’s altitude record in May 1931 in a balloon of his own design, which featured the first pressurized cabin used in flight. Jean-Felix Piccard, twin brother of Auguste, experimented with plastic balloons and helped to design the polyethylene Skyhook series of high-altitude balloons with which the U.S. Air Force sent manned flights to more than 100,000 feet (30,000 m) to collect data on the upper atmosphere. Sport ballooning (see photograph) has gained in popularity over the years.