You're listening to a Glassbox Media Podcast. I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So, what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminated. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. So, your car today on Carvana. Pick up these may apply. Membership means more with American Express Business Gold. Earn four times membership rewards points in your top two eligible spending categories every month, including eligible U.S. advertising purchases and select media, and U.S. purchases at restaurants, including takeout and delivery. What are you waiting for? Get the card that flexes with your spending every month. Terms and points cap apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold, MX Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I help you drift off one fact at a time. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. In today's episode is about hot air balloons. It's Toyota Truck Month. Time to get a truck that works as hard as you do. Tacoma, Tundra, built for the worksite, ready for the trail, and packed with tech that makes every drive smarter. Available with 360-degree panoramic cameras for perfect visibility in tight spots, powered tailgate for easy loading, and a high-tech connected screen to keep you on the grid no matter where you are. All backed by the brand known for its legendary reliability, the rugged Toyota Tacoma, and the full-size Tundra are built to handle it all. And right now, your local Toyota dealer has great financing and lease options available to qualified customers, meaning there's no better time to test drive the Toyota truck you need. What a great Toyota Truck Month deal today. When you visit buyatoyota.com. That's buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Struggling with weight loss? Prolon's five-day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it assists the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism and target visceral fat. In just five days, Prolon offers a science-backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork. Get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com. Thank you to Heather Lemora for sponsoring today's episode. A hot air balloon is o' lighter than air aircraft, consisting of a bag called an envelope which contains heated air. Suspended beneath is a gondola or wicker basket and some long distance or high altitude balloons a capsule which carries passengers and a source of heat, in most cases an open flame, caused by burning liquid propane. The heated air inside the envelope makes it buoyant since it has a lower density than the colder air outside the envelope. As with all aircraft, hot air balloons cannot fly beyond the atmosphere. The envelope does not have to be sealed at the bottom since the air inside the envelope is at about the same pressure as the surrounding air. In modern sport balloons, the envelope is generally made from nylon fabric and the inlet of the balloon closest to the burner flame is made from a fire resistant material such as Nomex. Modern balloons have been made in many shapes such as rocket ships in the shapes of various commercial products, though the traditional shape is used for most non-commercial and many commercial applications. The hot air balloon is the first successful human carrying flight technology. The first untethered manned hot air balloon flight in the world was performed in Paris, France by Jean-François Pilatres de Rosier and François Laurent de Land on November 21, 1783 in the balloon created by the Mont-Gauffier brothers. Hot air balloons that can be propelled through the air rather than simply drifting with the wind are known as thermal airships. A precursor of the hot air balloon was the Sky Lantern. Juga Leong of the Xu Han Kingdom during the Three Kingdoms era, 220-280 CE, used these airborne lanterns for military signaling. The Mongolian army studied Kongming lanterns from China and used them in the Battle of Lugnica during the Mongol invasion of Poland in the 13th century. This is the first time ballooning was known in the western world. In the 18th century, the Portuguese Jesuit priest Bartolomeo de Jagozmão in colonial Brazil envisioned an aerial apparatus named Pásarola, which was the predecessor of the hot air balloon. The Pásarola was intended to serve as an air vessel in order to facilitate communication and as a strategic device. In 1709, John V of Portugal decided to fund Bartolomeo de Jagozmão's project following a petition made by the Jesuit priest, and an unmanned demonstration was performed at Casa da Índia in the presence of John V and the Queen, Maria Anna of Austria. With the Italian cardinal Michelangelo Conti, two members of the Portuguese Royal Academy of History, one Portuguese diplomat and one chronicler serving as witnesses. This would bring some European attention to this event and this project. A later article dated on October 20, 1786 by the London Daily Universal Register would state that the inventor was able to raise himself by the use of his prototype. Also in 1709, the Portuguese Jesuit road manifesto sumarro paraus que ignoram poderse navegar pelo elemento do ar. Short manifesto for those who are unaware that it is possible to sail through the element air. He also left designs for a manned air vessel. In the 1970s, balloonist Julian Knott hypothesized that the Nazca line's geoglyphs creation to millennia ago could have been guided by the Nazca leaders in a balloon, possibly the earliest odd air balloon flights in human history. To support this theory, in 1975 he designed and piloted the Nazca prehistoric balloon, claiming to have used only methods and materials available to the pre-Inca Peruvians 1,000 years ago. The French brothers Joseph Michel and Jacques-Cetienne Mogoffier developed a hot air balloon in Anonay-Ardèche, France and demonstrated it publicly on September 19, 1783, making an unmanned flight lasting 10 minutes. After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first balloon flight with humans aboard, a tethered flight, performed on or around October 15, 1783 by Jean-François Pilatre de Rosier, who made at least one tethered flight from the yard of the Rivayon workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Later that same day, Pilatre de Rosier became the second human to ascend into the air, reaching an altitude of 26 meters, the length of the tether. The first free flight with human passengers was made a few weeks later, on November 21, 1783. King Louis XVI had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first pilots, but de Rosier along with Marquis-François-Anderland petitioned successfully for the honour. The first military use of a hot air balloon happened in 1794 during the Battle of Floros, when the French used the balloon l'entropronal for observation. Modern hot air balloons, was an on-board heat source, were developed by Ed Yoast and Jim Winker, beginning during the 1950s. Their work resulted in the first successful flight on October 22, 1960. The first modern hot air balloon to be made in the United Kingdom was the Bristol Bell, built in 1967. Presently hot air balloons are used primarily for recreation. On November 26, 2005, the J-Pod Tsinganya set the world altitude record for highest hot air balloon flight, reaching 21,027 meters. He took off from downtown Mumbai, India, and landed 240 km south in Ponchale. The previous record of 19,811 meters had been set by Per Lindström on June 6, 1988, in Plano, Texas. On January 15, 1991, Per Lindström, born in Sweden, but resident in the UK, and Richard Branson of the UK, flew 7,671.91 km from Japan to Northern Canada in the Virgin Pacific Flyer. With a volume of 74,000 cubic meters, the balloon envelope was the largest ever built for a hot aircraft. According to fly in the trans-oceanic jet streams, the Pacific Flyer recorded the fastest ground speed for a man balloon at 394 km per hour. The longest duration record was set by Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Picard, August Picard's grandson, and Britain Brian Jones, flying in the Breitling Orbiter III. It was the first non-stop trip around the world by balloon. The balloon left Chateau de Switzerland on March 1, 1999, and landed at 102 a.m. on March 21 in the Egyptian desert, 500 km south of Cairo. The man exceeded distance, endurance, and time records, traveling 19 days, 21 hours, and 55 minutes. Steve Fossoud, flying solo, exceeded the record for briefest time traveling around the world on July 3, 2002 in his sixth attempt, and 320 hours, 33 minutes. Fyodor Konyukov flew solo around the world on his first attempt in a hybrid hot air helium balloon from the 11th to the 23rd of July, 2016 for a round-the-world time of 268 hours, and 30 minutes. A hot air balloon for manned flight uses a single-layered fabric gas bag lifting envelope. With an opening at the bottom called the mouse or throat. Attached to the envelope is a basket or gondola for carrying the passengers. Right above the basket and centered in the mouth is the burner, which injects a flame into the envelope, heating the air within. The heater or burner is fueled by propane, a liquefied gas stored in pressure vessels, similar to high-pressure forklift cylinders. Modern hot air balloons are usually made of materials such as ripstop nylon or daugran, a polyester. During the manufacturing process, the material is cut into panels and sewn together along with structural load tapes that carry the weight of the gondola or basket. The individual sections, which extend from the throat to the crown of the envelope, are known as gores or gore sections. Envelopes can have as few as four gores or as many as 24 or more. Envelopes often have a crown ring at the very top. This is a hoop of smooth metal, usually aluminum, in approximately 30 centimeters in diameter. Vertical load tapes from the envelope are attached to the crown ring. At the bottom of the envelope, the vertical load tapes are sewn into loops that are connected to cables, one cable per load tape. These cables, often referred to as flying wires, are connected to the basket by carabiners. The most common technique for sewing panels together is called the French felled, French fell, or double lap seam. The two pieces of fabric are folded over on each other at their common edge. Possibly with a load tape as well, and sewn together with two rows of parallel stitching. Other methods include a flat lap seam, in which the two pieces of fabric are held together simply with two rows of parallel stitching, and a zigzag, where parallel zigzag stitching holds a double lap of fabric. The fabric, or at least part of it, the top one-third, for example, may be coated with a sealer, such as silicone or polyurethane, to make it impermeable to air. It is often the degradation of this coating and the corresponding loss of impermeability that ends the effective life of an envelope, not weakening of the fabric itself. Heat, moisture, and mechanical wear and tear during set-up and back-up are the primary causes of degradation. Once an envelope becomes too porous to fly, it may be retired and discarded or perhaps used as a rag bag, cold-inflated and open for children to run through. Products for recoding the fabric are becoming available commercially. A range of envelope sizes is available. The smallest one-person, basketless balloons, called hoppers or clout hoppers, have as little as 600 cubic meters of envelope volume. For a perfect sphere, the radius would be around 5 meters. At the other end of the scale, balloons used by commercial sightseeing operations may be able to carry well over two dozen people, with envelope volumes of up to 17,000 cubic meters. The most used size is about 2,800 cubic meters, allowing to carry 3 to 5 people. The top of the balloon usually has a vent of some sort, enabling the pilot to release hot air to slow and ascend, start to descend, or increase the rate of descend, usually for landing. Some hot air balloons have turning vents, which are side vents that, when opened, cause the balloon to rotate. Such vents are particularly useful for balloons with rectangular baskets to facilitate aligning the wider side of the basket for landing. The most common type of top vent is a disc-shaped flap of fabric called a parachute vent invented by Tracy Barnes. The fabric is connected around its edge to a set of vent lines that converge in the center. The arrangement of fabric and lines roughly resembles a parachute, thus the name. These vent lines are themselves connected to a control line that runs to the basket. A parachute vent is opened by pulling on the control line. Once the control line is released, the pressure of the remaining hot air pushes the vent fabric back into place. A parachute vent can be opened briefly while in flight to initiate a rapid descent. Slower descents are initiated by allowing the air in the balloon to cool naturally. The vent is pulled open completely to collapse the balloon after landing. An older and presently less commonly used style of top vent is called a Velcro style vent. This too is a disc of fabric at the top of the balloon. However, rather than having a set of vent lines that can repeatedly open and close the vent, the vent is secured by hook and loop fasteners, such as Velcro, and is only opened at the end of the flight. Balloons equipped with a Velcro style vent typically have a second maneuvering vent built into the side as opposed to the top of the balloon. Another common type of top design is the smart vent, which rather than lowering a fabric disc into the envelope as in the parachute type, gathers the fabric together in the center of the opening. This system can theoretically be used for in-flight maneuvering, but is more commonly used only as a rapid deflation device for use after landing of particular value in high winds. Other designs such as the pop-top and multi-vent systems have also attempted to address the need for rapid deflation on landing, but the parachute top remains popular as an all-around maneuvering and deflation system. Besides special shapes for marketing purposes, there are several variations on the traditional inverted teardrop shape. The simplest often used by home builders is a hemisphere on top of a truncated cone. More sophisticated designs attempt to minimize the circumferential stress on the fabric, with different degrees of success depending on whether they take fabric weight and varying air density into account. This shape may be referred to as natural. Finally, some specialized balloons are designed to minimize aerodynamic drag in the vertical direction to improve flight performance in competitions. Hot air balloon baskets are commonly made of woven wicker or ratten. These materials have proven to be sufficiently light, strong and durable for balloon flight. Such baskets are usually rectangular or triangular in shape. They vary in size from just big enough for two people to large enough to carry 30. Water baskets often have internal partitions for structural bracing and compartmentalize the passengers. Small holes may be woven into the side of the basket to act as footholds for passengers climbing in or out. Baskets may also be made of aluminum, especially a collapsible aluminum frame with a fabric skin to reduce weight or increase portability. These may be used by pilots without a ground crew or who are attempting to set altitude, duration or distance records. Other specialty baskets include the fully enclosed gondolas used for around the world attempts and baskets that consist of little more than a seat for the pilot and perhaps one passenger. The burner unit gasifies liquid propane, mixes it with air, ignites the mixture and directs the flame and exhaust into the mouth of the envelope. Burners vary in power output. Each will generally produce 2 to 3 mW of heat. 7 to 10 million BTUs per hour was double, triple or quadruple burner configurations installed where more power is needed. The pilot actuates a burner by opening a propane valve known as a blast valve. The valve may be spring loaded so that it closes automatically or it may stay open until closed by the pilot. The burner has a pilot light to ignite the propane and air mixture. The pilot light may be lit by the pilot with an external device such as a flint striker or a lighter or with a built-in piezoelectric spark. Where more than one burner is present, the pilot can use one or more at a time depending on the desired heat output. Each burner has a metal coil of propane tubing the flame shoots through to preheat the incoming liquid propane. The burner unit may be suspended from the mouth of the envelope or supported rigidly over the basket. The burner unit may be mounted on a gimbal to enable the pilot to aim the flame and avoid overheating the envelope fabric. A burner may have a secondary propane valve that releases propane more slowly and thereby generates a different sound. This is called a whisper burner and is used for flight over livestock to lessen the chance of spooking them. It also generates a more yellow flame and is used for night glows because it lights up the inside of the envelope better than the primary valve. Propane fuel tanks are usually cylindrical pressure vessels made from aluminum, stainless steel or titanium with a valve at one end to feed the burner and to refuel. They may have a fuel gauge and a pressure gauge. Common tank sizes are 38, 57 and 76 liters. They may be intended for upright or horizontal use and may be mounted inside or outside the basket. The pressure necessary to force the fuels through the line to the burner may be supplied by the vapor pressure of the propane itself if warm enough or by the introduction of an inert gas such as nitrogen. Tanks may be preheated with electrical heat tapes to produce sufficient vapor pressure for cold weather flying. And tanks are usually also wrapped in an insulating blanket to preserve heat during the setup and flight. A balloon may be outfitted with a variety of instruments to aid the pilot. These commonly include an altimeter, a rate of climb, vertical speed indicator known as a variometer, envelope air temperature and ambient air temperature. A GPS receiver can be used to indicate ground speed. Traditional aircraft speed indicators would be useless and direction. Increasing the air temperature inside the envelope makes it less dense than the surrounding ambient air. The balloon floats because of the buoyant force exerted on it. This force is the same force that acts on objects when they are at water and is described by the Archimedes principle. The amount of lift or buoyancy provided by a hot air balloon depends primarily upon the difference between the temperature of the air inside the envelope and the temperature of the air outside the envelope. For most envelopes made of nylon fabric, the maximal internal temperatures limited to approximately 120 degrees Celsius. The melting point of nylon is significantly greater than this maximal operating temperature, about 230 degrees Celsius, but higher temperatures cause the strength of the nylon fabric to degrade more quickly over time. With a maximal operating temperature of 120 degrees Celsius, balloon envelopes can generally be flown for between 400 and 500 hours before the fabric needs to be replaced. Many balloon pilots operate their envelopes at temperatures significantly less than the maximum to extend envelope fabric life. The density of air at 20 degrees Celsius is about 1.2 kilograms per meter cubed. The total lift for a balloon of 2,800 meters cubed heated to 99 degrees Celsius would be 723.5 kilograms. This is just enough to generate neutral buoyancy for the total system mass. Lift off would require a slightly greater temperature depending on the desired rate of climb. In reality, the air contained in the envelope is not at all the same temperature, and so these calculations are based on averages. For typical atmospheric conditions, a hot air balloon heated to 99 degrees Celsius requires about 3.91 meters cubed of envelope volume to lift 1 kilogram. The precise amount of lift provided depends not only upon the internal temperature, but the external temperature, altitude above sea level, and humidity of the surrounding air. On a warm day, a balloon cannot lift as much as on a cool day because the temperature required for launch will exceed the maximum sustainable for nylon envelope fabric. So in the lower atmosphere, the lift provided by a hot air balloon decreases about 3 percent per 1,000 meters of altitude gained.
