Jean-Pierre Blanchard
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Jean-Pierre Blanchard (aka Jean Pierre François Blanchard) (7 July 1753 – 7 March 1809) was a French inventor, most remembered a pioneer in aviation and ballooning.
Blanchard made his first successful balloon flight in Paris on 2 March 1784, in a hydrogen gas balloon launched from the Champ de Mars. The first successful manned balloon flight took place only a few months earlier, on 21 November 1783, when Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes took off at the Palace of Versailles in a tethered hot air balloon constructed by the Montgolfier brothers. Blanchard's balloon was pushed by the wind across the Seine and back again to the rue de Sèvres.
Blanchard took part in another balloon flight on 30 November 1784, taking off with an American, Dr John Jeffries, from Rhedarium Garden west of Grosvenor Square in London. This flight took place just under 11 weeks after the first flight in Britain (and the first outside France), when Italian Vincenzo Lunardi flew from Moorfields to Ware on 15 September 1784. Blanchard also flew with Jeffries in the first flight over the English Channel, taking about 2½ hours to travel from England to France on 7 January 1785.
Following the invention of the modern parachute in 1783 by Sébastien Lenormand in France, in 1785 Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated it as a means of safely disembarking from a hot air balloon. While Blanchard's first parachute demonstrations were conducted with a dog as the passenger, he later had the opportunity to try it himself when in 1793 his hot air balloon ruptured and he used a parachute to escape. Subsequent development of the parachute focused on it becoming more compact. While the early parachutes were made of linen stretched over a wooden frame, in the late 1790s, Blanchard began making parachutes from folded silk, taking advantage of silk's strength and light weight.
On 9 January 1793, Blanchard conducted the first balloon flight in North America, ascending from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and landing in Deptford, Gloucester County, New Jersey. One of the flight's witnesses that day was President George Washington. Blanchard also holds the record of first balloon flights in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland.
He married Marie Madéleine-Sophie Armant (better known as Sophie Blanchard) in 1804. In 1809, Blanchard had a heart attack while in his balloon at the Hague. He fell from his balloon and died some weeks later from his severe injuries. His widow continued to support herself with ballooning demonstrations until it also killed her. On 6 July 1819, Norwich Duff, an Edinburgh born naval officer then undertaking a tour of western Europe, recorded in his travel log how he:[citation needed]
| “ | went to a Grand Fete at the Tivoli Gardens (Jardin de Tivoli, Paris) where [he] witnessed a most melancholy accident: among other amusements for the evening Madame Blanchard was to ascend from the garden in a Balloon, and when a certain height in the air, to set off a display of fire works; owing to the Balloon touching some trees as it ascended, from the people not allowing it to rise at once, a part of the fire works were deranged, and on their being let off, threw their fire upwards in place of downwards, set fire to the Balloon, [which] burst, and precipitated poor Madame Blanchard with her car, from the height of several thousand feet, into the Rue Provence, where she fell on top of a house and from there into the street where she was dashed to pieces. The effect of so shocking an accident on the minds of several thousand people assembled for amusement, and in high spirits, may easily be imagined: everything else was put a stop to, the proprietors gave notice that the admission money would be given to the poor woman's children, and ladies and gentlemen stood at the gate to receive subscriptions for her family'. | ” |
[edit] External links
- History of Hot Air Ballooning
- Journal of Jean-Pierre Blanchard's forty-fifth ascension, being the first performed in America, on the ninth of January, 1793 (1918)
- This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.
