I mean your average party balloon, when it’s completely deflated, it seems you have to put extra effort into getting it going. As soon as it starts inflating, you need less effort.
In: Physics
Not to completely disregard a lot of people’s answers, but it’s all about pressure.
When it’s small, you increase the pressure in the balloon significantly more when blowing because the surface area of the balloon is smaller. As it expands, there is increasingly more surface area, which makes it easier to apply more pressure, but you have to blow significantly more air to increase pressure since there is more surface area.
If you were to increase pressure linearly in the balloon, you would find the effort/force behind your blow would not actually change from small to large, but since our lungs have a small capacity this isn’t particularly feasible.
Also, when it gets more full it doesn’t push back with significant force because of how small the hole is, the pressure is still technically the same, but you only feel the force of the pressure multiplied by the size of the hole. If you’ve ever blown up a balloon with a larger hole, you’ll notice it’s much harder to hold the air in when it gets full because of this.
Understanding pressure/stress is just a force over an area (P = F/A), i.e. psi (pounds per square foot) is key to understanding BALLOON MECHANICS!!
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