the.com/hot air balloon
Flight by faith: heat rises, you rise with it, steering is a rumor.
means A large fabric envelope filled with heated air that lifts a basket of passengers off the ground, floating wherever the wind decides to take it.
from The phrase is just literal compound English — hot + air + balloon — but the device itself dates to 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers in France, papermakers by trade, noticed smoke and heated air making scraps and fabric rise over a fire. They built a huge paper-lined silk globe, lit a fire beneath it, and sent it skyward, first with no passengers, then with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, and finally with humans. 'Balloon' itself comes from French ballon, from Italian pallone, meaning a big ball — the same root family as 'ball' and 'balloon' in the toy-store sense, just scaled up to carry people into the sky.
- physics
- hot air is simply less dense, not magic
- steering
- you pick altitude, the wind picks direction
- landing spot
- officially unknown until it happens
- first flyers
- a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, 1783