Daily Bread for 11.21.15

Good morning, Whitewater.

We’ll have continuing snowfall in the morning and cloudy skies this afternoon, with a daytime high of thirty.  Sunrise is 6:54 and sunset 4:26, for 9h 31m 50s.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

This month, Théo Sanson probably set a world slackline record.  What’s that like?  It’s like this —

ACROSS THE SKY – a world record slackline in the utah desert from Camp 4 Collective on Vimeo.

Quite the feat, and beautifully recorded.

On this day in 1783, two Frenchmen ride in an untheterd balloon for about five miles:

François Laurent le Vieux d’Arlandes  and Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier made the first manned free balloon flight on 21 November 1783, in a Montgolfier balloon.

D’Arlandes was born in Anneyron in the Dauphiné. He met Joseph Montgolfier at the Jesuit college of Tournon. He became an infantry officer in the French royal guard.

The first public demonstration of a balloon by the Montgolfier brothers took place in June 1783, and was followed by an untethered flight of a sheep, a cockerel and a duck from the front courtyard of the Palace of Versailles on 19 September. The French KingLouis XVI decided that the first manned flight would contain two condemned criminals, but de Rozier enlisted the help of theDuchess de Polignac to support his view that the honour of becoming first balloonists should belong to someone of higher status, and d’Arlandes agreed to accompany him. The King was persuaded to permit d’Arlandes and de Rozier to become the first pilots.

After several tethered tests to gain some experience of controlling the balloon, de Rozier and d’Arlandes made their first untethered flight in a Montgolfier hot air balloon on 21 November 1783, taking off at 1:54 p.m. from the garden of the Château de la Muette in the Bois de Boulogne, in the presence of the King. Also watching was U.S. envoy, Benjamin Franklin. Their 25-minute flight travelled slowly about 5½ miles (some 9 km) to the southeast, attaining an altitude of 3,000 feet, before returning to the ground at the Butte-aux-Cailles, then on the outskirts of Paris. After the flight, the pilots drank champagne to celebrate the flight, a tradition carried on by balloonists to this day.

D’Arlandes proposed a flight to cross the English Channel in 1784, but the plan came to nothing.