The Inventor of the Hydrogen Balloon : Jacques Alexandre Charles

- વિશ્વના વિજ્ઞાનિઓ

The hydrogen-filled balloons that rise high in the sky are useful to study and predict weather patterns. Today, balloons are also used to give people joyrides in the sky for entertainment. The invention of such balloons was made by a scientist named Jacques Alexandre Charles. He also discovered the principle that when gases are heated, their volume increases. This discovery gave rise to many new experiments and inventions.

In the year 1783, Charles himself flew in a hydrogen balloon and traveled up to a height of 1,800 feet in the sky.

Jacques Charles was born in November 1746 in the village of Beaugency, in the Loire region of France. He became world famous when, for the very first time, he launched a hydrogen balloon in Paris. That balloon flew for 45 minutes and landed 21 kilometers away. It is said that about 400,000 people gathered to watch this historic event! After inventing the balloon, Charles made many improvements to it and created new kinds of balloons, which were later used for weather forecasting. He also studied how the volume of different gases expands when they are heated. These principles are today known as Charles’s Law. In 1793, he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences and also became a professor. He passed away in April 1823 in Paris.