Since the start of the Olympic Games in Paris on July 26, the iconic cauldron has been blazing away on the ground during the day. Come sunset, however, and it rises into the sky to hover 30 metres above the ground. Throughout Olympic history, the cauldron has been a giant fixture on the ground, usually located in or near the main stadium. Paris is the first to have a moving, floating, air-borne cauldron. Here is a look at the design of the Paris Olympics cauldron. First, the inspiration The cauldron has been designed by a multidisciplinary French designer Mathieu Lehanneur as a hot air balloon. “The torch, the torch relay cauldron and the Olympic cauldron are not separate objects. They are chapters in one great story. Each embodies the spirit of the Paris Games. The cauldron takes the form of a ring of fire suspended above a liquid surface. Both pure and magical, it seems to float and is reflected in its metallic base. If the torch is a sacred fire that is passed on, the cauldron is the object around which we gather and which unites our energies,” according to Lehanneur. The cauldron is a tribute to the brothers, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier, who were pioneers in creating hot air balloons. Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne were a part of a family that had 16 children. Their father owned paper factories in Vidalon in the south of France, and funded and encouraged the duo's experiments with balloons. Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne discovered that a paper or cloth bag filled with hot air would rise off the ground, float and, then, return to the ground. They conducted experiments in which they burnt straw and wool under the mouths of bags. They travelled to Paris and Versailles and demonstrated that a large balloon, holding a sheep, a rooster and a duck, could float around eight minutes and land safely about 3.2 km away. None other than King Louis XVI was present when the Montgolfiers launched the first hot-air balloon at Versailles in September 1783. In November of the same year, the brothers launched the first manned and untethered hot-air balloon flight. It travelled 5.5 miles and carried Marquis d' Arlandes, François Laurent, and Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier, a doctor, as passengers. This balloon travelled over Paris for 9 km for 25 minutes. The design Lehanneur's cauldron design for Paris 2024 is 30 metres high. The diameter, known as the ring of fire, where the Olympic fire burns during the event, is seven metres and symbolises one of the country's fundamental beliefs, fraternity. The cauldron aligns with the designer's creative philosophy “Because we are a body and a spirit. / Because some objects have the power to transform us. / Because what we possess represents us, / And what we pass on will say about us.” The cauldron is located at Jardin des Tuileries, near the Louvre, La Concorde, and the Arc de Triomphe. This is the site from where the Montgolfier brothers had set afloat their first hot air balloon in 1783 before a crowd of 4 lakh people. In keeping with the aim of the Games to be climate-friendly, the Olympic cauldron is not lit by fossil fuel but completely by electricity. There are 40 LED lights and 200 high-pressure misting nozzles whose interaction creates the appearance of a real fire. It is only fitting that, in another first, visitors have a free entry around the cauldron to marvel at it and, of course, take selfies.
