Balloon Jumping: Yesterday’s Fun (and Dangerous) Sport of the Future

Faster than a cannonball along dirigible ! More knock-down than a horseless carriage ! able-bodied to leap short cottages in a exclusive bound ! It ’s a boo ! It ’s an plane ! It ’s a … jumper balloon ?

In the go - go 1920s , everything was looking up . People imagined that the sky of the future would shortly be dotted with airships andflying car . And one promising “ fun of the future ” to come out of this era looks pretty damn fun : balloon jumping .

https://gizmodo.com/1923-envisions-the-two-wheeled-flying-car-of-1973-512620897

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The theme was to detect a balloon that was floaty enough to plagiarise you off your feet , but not so buoyant that you ’d drift uncontrollably into the sky . The January 1927 issue of Science and Invention clip described how such a balloon could be outfitted with a harness and would let the futurist sportswoman , “ jump over a house , across a full stream and even over fences and trees . ”

The magazine included an representative of the athletics ( above ) , and described how they ’d gotten wind of balloon jumping experimentation already happening in London . They go for that this latest sporting fad would surely invade the United States sometime presently .

From Science and Invention :

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Races with balloons of this variety would doubtless be great fun and the danger would be very slight . obstruction races of form would be the most fun because you then lend the advantage of the balloons into full playing period . We hope to soon see this play develop by some American balloon manufacturing business in this land .

British authorSir Arthur Conan Doyle , far-famed for the Sherlock Holmes series , tried to take credit for the idea of balloon jumping in March of 1927 , though he admonish that it may be too life-threatening for the medium mortal . His solution to improve rubber ? Everybody should just mislay some weight .

“ I find that too much should not be attempted , ” Doyle told the Associated Press . “ If the margin between the man ’s weighting and the lifting power is only a few pounds , and huge leap are made it will think a loss of ascendancy and be the cause of many accidents . What is needed is to turn the fifteen stone man into a five rock man , so that he can go on his way swiftly and without weariness . ”

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The buzz around this futuristic play cursorily circulate in newspapers and clip around the U.S. , including places like Time and Forum . The fittingly named Frederick S. Hoppin wrote an article for the August 1927 number of Forum ( with illustrations by Johan Bull ) , romantically describing the sport as easy , safe , and unbelievably playfulness .

Each prison term when he alights after a jump , the jump shot rent a few sluggish steps until the balloon stops descend and start to rise again , just as a flyfisherman time lag for his line to straighten out on his back dramatis personae . Otherwise this game need no particular skill or proficiency , but just a picayune recitation . A gentle wind , an exposed country , and a very slight balance of weightiness in favor of the military personnel over the balloon are the necessity . Besides , the tradition of the danger of the prominent balloon has made men provide the jumpers with all kinds of safety devices , — bags of sand to further equilibrize the up twist of the balloon , base hit catches to activate the sweater to dislocate easy out of the harness if , on landing , a sudden gust of wind begins to drag him along with it , and even a rope around the waist attached by its other end to some one on the ground , to keep the jump shot from being flex by too secure a blast into the tail of a runaway kite .

Some people take it even further into the future , imagining it as an exciting new method acting of practical transportation . The July 19 , 1927 edition of the Joplin News Herald in Joplin , Missouri described it as potentially being helpful for the “ stout ” and the “ elderly ” in climbing steep hill or crossing a creek without need of a bridge . Everyone might one twenty-four hour period benefit from such a machine , they claim :

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How helpful this sort of thing would be . We could strip the spring cherry tree without endangering our legs . We could dispense with elevators and go into our offices on the third or fourth floors by merely leap up to the windowpane and crawl in . We could do a thousand and one thing easily that we now do with difficultness .

But despite its hope as both the sportsman and personal fare equipment of the futurity , balloon jump was n’t perhaps as safe as so many presume . It was imagine that average people would soon be hopping around the countryside without a care in the man , but even experts shin with the emerging sport . In March of 1927 , an experienced parachute jumper by the name of Sergeant Frank Dobbs was killed in the U.K. while balloon jumping . Dobbs grabbed onto a live electrical conducting wire and was electrocuted to last .

The U.S. would not see balloon jump take off either as a widely adopted sport , nor as a very practical way to get from point A to point B. But for a brief period in the tardy 1920s — with new design incommercial aviationand newaerial recordsbeing set each twelvemonth — it ’s wanton to realize why everyone was bet to the sky for the fun and games of tomorrow .

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