Word: balloonful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Widespread was the opinion that the Roosevelt tax plan had been sent up largely as a "trial balloon" which the country's disapproval had promptly punctured. Another suspicion was that it had been started to create a popular backfire for a sales...
Boston's Dr. John Jeffries, with Jean-Pierre Francois Blanchard in 1785, was first to cross the English Channel in a balloon. Struggling to keep the bag aloft, they cast out successively sand ballast, wings, ornaments, all scientific apparatus (except the barometer), biscuits, apples, oars, moulinet, anchors, cords, finally their outer garments...
...cosmic rays over Peru, the U. S., Canada; Dr. Compton's journeying with an electroscope around the Pacific and over North America from Mexico City to north of Churchill on Hudson Bay; two young men killed carrying a cosmic ray scope up Mt. McKinley; Professor Auguste Piccard & aide ballooning into the stratosphere ten miles above Switzerland; Professor Erich Regener sending a free balloon with an electroscope 17½ miles above Stuttgart...
Brazil had been long apotheosizing Alberto Santos-Dumont. First called "Father of Aviation," he presently became throughout South America "first man to fly," despite his own deprecation of the title. "First man to fly" was Frenchman Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier, who went up in a captive fire-balloon in October 1783. "First man to fly in a powered heavier-than-air craft" was, as every schoolboy knows, Orville Wright along the beach at Kitty Hawk, N. C. in 1903. Alberto Santos-Dumont first got off the ground with a box-kite type of powered machine in France three years...
Fearless son of a rich Brazil coffee-planter and engineer, he inherited and indulged a mechanical bent. At 10 he drove a Baldwin locomotive in his father's private railway. That year he saw a balloon ascension at a Sao Paulo fair. Sent to Paris at 18 to finish his education, he had his first balloon ascent at 24 with Machuron, designer of Explorer Salomon Auguste Andree's famed balloon. Straightway he began fiddling with lighter-than-air craft, built ten airships of which No 6 won the 100,000-franc Deutsche prize for the first flight around...