Word: balloon
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...before returning to earth some 50 miles (80 km) from his home. Thankfully, Falcon was discovered hours later, reportedly hiding in a box in the family's attic. While his ill-advised adventure never really got off the ground, there is a rich history of do-it-yourself balloon travel - and many of these voyages do have tragic endings. (Read a Tuned In post about the "Balloon Boy" reality TV connection...
...fitting coincidence, the first known manned balloon flight occurred 226 years to the day before Falcon's supposed flight. On Oct. 15, 1783, French scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier ascended 84 ft. (25 m) off the ground - the length of the rope attached to the vessel. He followed this tentative milestone with the first untethered flight on Nov. 21, reaching an altitude of 3,000 ft. (900 m). But de Rozier would also have the inglorious distinction of becoming ballooning's first fatality. During a 1785 attempt to cross the English Channel, de Rozier...
While the branch of ballooning that de Rozier pioneered became safer and more refined (the first modern hot-air balloon appeared in 1960), it didn't deter a fringe element from testing some dubious designs of their own. Perhaps the most famous of these is the strange 1982 voyage of Larry Walters, known in the press as Lawn Chair Larry. On July 2, Walters, a truck driver from Long Beach, Calif., attached 42 helium-filled weather balloons to an aluminum lawn chair, and with a bottle of soda, a CB radio and a BB gun, lifted off in the makeshift...
Lawn Chair Larry's unlikely flight spawned many imitators. In 2008, Oregon man Kent Couch successfully took his own balloon-powered lawn chair on a 235-mile (378 km) trek across the state, traveling across the Idaho state line. This was Couch's third trip - his second stopped just short of the state line, while the first ended with him parachuting from the chair after popping too many balloons...
...last such showcase for the party ahead of expected elections next spring. Never mind the bombastic speeches and the relentless stream of policy announcements: the strongest indication that the Nasty Party might have gotten, well, a bit nicer was to be found at Conference Pride, a pumping, churning, balloon-festooned disco, billed as the Tories' "first official conference gay night." (See a visual history of the gay-rights movement...