Incendiary balloon
weaponized balloon carrying an incendiary device as payload
An incendiary balloon (or balloon bomb) is a balloon inflated with a lighter-than-air gas such as hot air, hydrogen, or helium, that has a bomb, incendiary device, or Molotov cocktail attached. The balloon is carried by the prevailing winds to the target area, where it falls or releases its payload.
Historical use
Early proposals
In 1792, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier suggested using balloons for bombing British forces in Toulon. In 1807, Denmark tried to build a dirigible to bomb British ships blockading Copenhagen. In 1846 a British board rejected as impractical a bombing design by Samuel Alfred Warner. Attempts by Henry Tracey Coxwell to interest the British government a few years later were rejected as well.
In 1847, John Wise proposed the use of balloon bombs in the Mexican–American War.
Austrian use at Venice in 1849
The first aggressive use of balloons in warfare occurred in 1849 during the First Italian War of Independence. Austrian imperial forces, who were besieging Venice, attempted to deploy approximately 200 paper hot air balloons. Each balloon was equipped with a 24-to-30-pound (11 to 14 kg) bomb, designed to be dropped over the besieged city via a time fuse.
The public source identifies “Incendiary balloon” as weaponized balloon carrying an incendiary device as payload. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Incendiary, balloon and weaponized.
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This entry incorporates text from “Incendiary balloon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.