In the 1920s, some balloonists did not float so much as bounce. Balloon jumping, a sport that showed up in the United States by 1923 and in England by 1927, strapped a person under a gas bag too weak to carry them on its own. To get airborne, the jumper had to push off the ground with their legs and let the balloon stretch each leap into a long, slow hop.
It sounds like a cartoon. It was also, briefly, a practical tool for the giant airships and high-altitude balloons of the era.
How balloon jumping worked
The kit was minimal: an air bag, a suspension sling and a primitive bench. The trick was buoyancy. A full-size balloon carries its passengers with lift to spare; a jumping balloon was deliberately sized to fall just short, so it cancelled most of a person’s weight without lifting them away. The result was a human who weighed a fraction of normal and could cover long distances in a few bounds.
The lifting gas depended on the country. In the United States, enthusiasts praised helium because it does not burn, which meant balloonists could smoke while airborne. Elsewhere, flammable hydrogen was common. Hot air, the default for recreational balloons today, was not used at the time.
From party trick to repair tool
Crews working on large airships and stratospheric balloons quickly adopted the jumping balloon as a cheap way to reach the tops of enormous envelopes. That mattered because the safest spots to launch high-altitude balloons, such as the Stratobowl in South Dakota and the iron pits at Crosby, Minnesota, were remote places with no real airport equipment.
The most dramatic job came during the second launch attempt of the Soviet balloon USSR-3, led by Georgy Prokofiev. It took two hopper balloons to free the tangled netting on top of the giant craft. One jumper fell off his bench and survived only by grabbing the balloon’s cables.
A timeline of riding small balloons
- 1923: balloon jumping appears as a sport in the United States.
- 1927: the sport is under way in England.
- 1937: Jean Piccard experiments with flying under a cluster of balloons in Rochester, Minnesota.
- October 22, 1960: Ed Yost flies the first modern hot air balloon in Bruning, Nebraska, with a chair instead of a basket, arguably the first hopper flight since the airship age.
- 1979: Per Lindstrand of Colt Balloons develops the Cloudhopper, a one-person hot air balloon with the pilot in a harness.
- 1982: Larry Walters lifts off in a lawn chair tied to 43 weather balloons and climbs to nearly 3 miles.
- 2020: David Blaine rises to 24,900 feet under 52 helium balloons, then parachutes down.
The modern descendants
Today’s hopper balloons are small hot air craft with envelopes of roughly 14,000 to 35,000 cubic feet and flights of about an hour to an hour and a half. The pilot sits in a seat or harness with the propane tank on their back and the burner overhead. Cameron Balloons and Lindstrand Balloons are the two main commercial makers; most others are built by amateurs.
The gap between old and new is easy to put in numbers. Yost’s 1960 envelope held 31,000 cubic feet, already near the top of today’s hopper range. A typical passenger hot air balloon is many times that size, which is why a hopper can carry only one person.
The 1920s jumpers never made it to the record books, but their idea of borrowing just enough lift to defy gravity a little keeps returning. If you like people launched in unusual ways, compare the viral human catapult claim against the Guinness record, or the Air Canada jet that glided to Gimli on empty tanks.
The Cloudhopper name is still in use: Lindstrand Balloons, the company Per Lindstrand founded after leaving Thunder & Colt, makes the current version.
Further reading
Image: Zeitblick, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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