Records
On December 13, 1913 through December 17, 1913 Hugo Kaulen stayed aloft for 87 hours. His record lasted until 1976.
On 27 May 1931, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer became the first to reach the stratosphere in a balloon.
On 31 August 1933, Alexander Dahl took the first picture of the Earth's curvature in an open hydrogen gas balloon.
The helium-filled Explorer II balloon, piloted by US Army Air Corps officers Capt. Orvil A. Anderson, Maj. William E. Kepner and Capt. Albert W. Stevens, reached a new record height of 22,066 m (72,395 ft) on 11 November 1935. This followed the same crew's previous near-fatal plunge in July 1934 in a predecessor craft, Explorer, after its canopy ruptured just 190 m (624 ft) short (it transpired) of the then-current altitude record of 22,000 m (72,178 ft) set by the Soviet balloon Osoaviakhim-1.
The previous altitude record for a manned balloon was set at 34,668 m (113,739 ft) on 4 May 1961 by Malcolm Ross and Victor Prather in the Strato-Lab V balloon payload launched from the deck of the USS Antietam in the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1976, Ed Yost set 13 aviation world’s records for distance traveled and amount of time aloft in his attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean —solo— by balloon (3.938 km, 107:37 h).
The current altitude record for a manned balloon has been set at 38,960.5 m (127,823 ft) by Felix Baumgartner in the Red Bull Stratos balloon launched from Roswell, New Mexico on Sunday, Oct 14, 2012.
On 1 March 1999 Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones set off in the balloon Breitling Orbiter 3 from Château d'Oex in Switzerland on the first non-stop balloon circumnavigation around the globe. They landed in Egypt after a 40,814 km (25,361 mi) flight lasting 19 days, 21 hours and 55 minutes.
The altitude record for an unmanned balloon is 53.0 kilometres (173,882 ft), reached with a volume of 60,000 cubic metres. The balloon was launched by JAXA on 25 May 2002 from Iwate Prefecture, Japan. This is the greatest height ever obtained by an atmospheric vehicle. Only rockets, rocket planes, and ballistic projectiles have flown higher.
Read more about this topic: Balloon (aircraft)
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—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)
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—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, but intellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.”
—W.N.P. Barbellion (1889–1919)