Today, hydrogen -- in 1783. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Hydrogen is a wonderful mouthful of
a word. Antoine Lavoisier named it in 1783, after he
realized that it makes water when it's burned in oxygen.
Hydrogen means "maker of water" in Greek. But the element
had been known before that. The sixteenth-century Swiss
alchemist Paracelsus separated it, but he seems to have
confused it with other flammable gases.
Hydrogen came to public attention seventeen years before
Lavoisier named it. The English chemist Henry Cavendish
identified it. He thought it was a kind of flammable, or
phlogisticated, air. Phlogiston was the old alchemical
principle of combustion. By 1783 Cavendish had also seen
that hydrogen formed water when it was burned; but he
didn't realize that oxygen was involved, too.
That was also the year the French began making balloon
ascents in Paris. The Montgolfier brothers used hot air
in the first manned balloon. Hot air is easy enough to
come by (as I suppose we all know too well) but heated
air is only a little less dense than the cool air around
it. Whatever people thought hydrogen was, they knew it
was very light -- about 1/15th the density of air. It had
terrific lifting power in a balloon.
The champion of hydrogen-filled balloons was the French
natural philosopher Alexandre Charles. He flew an
unmanned hydrogen balloon just before the Montgolfiers'
flight. He flew a manned one only 3-1/2 months afterward.
He invented a hydrogen generator that mixed huge
quantities of sulfuric acid with iron filings.
London sneered at French balloons. But the intellectual
climate was different further to the north. In
Birmingham, the founders of the Industrial Revolution met
in a club called the Lunar Society. These were people
like Watt, Priestley, Wedgwood, Boulton, and Erasmus
Darwin. Science was no sport for this serious group.
Rather, it was a means for creating social reform. And
they saw scientific possibilities in the French balloons.
In 1784 Watt and Boulton built an unmanned paper balloon,
filled it with air and hydrogen, and sent it up on a
timed fuse. They hoped to learn whether the reverberating
sound of thunder was the result of repeated claps or of
echoes. Would a single explosion result in reverberation?
The experiment was inconclusive, but the explosion was
apparently a grand and soul-satisfying one.
And so the new sport of ballooning put words like
inflammable air and phlogiston on every tongue. These
huge hydrogen-filled spheres dressed the sky in fantastic
colors. They caught the public's fancy and hurried
chemistry out of the alchemical laboratory. Balloons
helped tie chemistry to the high technology of the
Industrial Revolution. Those wonderful and seemingly
purposeless playthings remind us that you and I are part
of the process we call science, even when we only sit
upon the sidelines.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
Rolt, L. T. C., The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning
1783-1903. New York: Walker and Company, 1966.
This is a revised version of Episode
From the 1897 Encylopaedia
Alexandre Charles' hydrogen balloon
Model of the Montgolfier Brothers' balloon, National Air
and Space Museum
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright
© 1988-2000 by John H. Lienhard.