96 Ballooning: Transportation or Competition?
From earliest times human beings have looked to the sky and wished to soar through it like the birds. Pioneer airmen Wilbur and Orville Wright launched the modern Aviation Age with their motor-powered plane in 1903, but some 140 years earlier daredevils had begun leaving the earth via balloons, in an alternate version of flying that still persists today.
The first manned balloon took to the sky in France in 1783—after its inventors had safely tested their device with a sheep, rooster, and duck as passengers. Though that hot-air-filled balloon remained aloft only 20 minutes and traveled a mere five miles, within two years balloonists had traversed the 30-mile-wide English Channel. In 1793 the first balloon went up in America, a hydrogen-filled device whose take-off was observed by George Washington himself.
Once airplanes had replaced balloons as the principal means of air transportation, balloonists concentrated on setting height, distance, and duration records. In the 1970s and 1980s several new records were set and broken. These feats were made possible because of new techniques for keeping balloons—now generally helium-filled—at steady temperatures.
But circumnavigating the globe remained the final, elusive target until March 1999. After a 19-day flight, Bertrand Piccard of Switzerland and Brian Jones of England landed in Egypt, having flown 29,056 miles to circle the globe. At times they flew at more than 36,000 feet and over 114 miles per hour.
96 热气球：交通工具还是竞赛项目？
从远古时代起，人类就仰望天空，希望像鸟儿一样翱翔其中。先锋飞行员威尔伯和奥维尔·莱特在1903年用他们的动力飞机开启了现代航空时代，但大约140年前，冒险者们就已经开始通过热气球离开地面，这种飞行方式的另一种形式至今仍然存在。
1783年，第一个载人热气球在法国升空——在此之前，发明者们用绵羊、公鸡和鸭子作为乘客，安全测试了他们的装置。尽管那个充满热空气的热气球只在空中停留了20分钟，仅飞行了5英里，但不到两年，热气球驾驶者就穿越了30英里宽的英吉利海峡。1793年，第一个热气球在美国升空，这是一个充满氢气的装置，乔治·华盛顿亲自见证了它的起飞。
一旦飞机取代热气球成为主要的空中交通工具，热气球驾驶者就专注于创造高度、距离和持续时间的记录。在20世纪70年代和80年代，几项新记录被创造又被打破。这些壮举之所以成为可能，是因为出现了让热气球（如今通常充满氦气）保持稳定温度的新技术。
但环球飞行一直是最终的、难以实现的目标，直到1999年3月。经过19天的飞行，瑞士的伯特兰·皮卡德和英国的布莱恩·琼斯在埃及着陆，他们飞行了29056英里，完成了环球飞行。有时他们的飞行高度超过36000英尺，时速超过114英里。