On this day all the way back in 1783, physicist Jean Francois Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, a French noble, became the first humans to take flight.
The balloon they took off in was created by two brothers, scions of a family at the forefront of the paper-making industry, who noticed when working in the mill that smoke could lift paper into the air.
After several attempts, the brothers found that a combination of paper and linen could create a viable floating balloon when exposed to a fire. Through trial-and-error they managed to construct balloons that were several meters wide.
With time, they were ready for passenger test flights – but the brothers weren’t about to do that themselves. Instead, after a sheep, duck, and rooster returned unharmed from the first test, the physicist and the marquis stepped up and volunteered for the next one. They were in the air for under half an hour but managed to soar to 3,000 feet above the streets of Paris, eventually landing safely in the city’s outskirts.
De Rozier would go on to set another aviation record, becoming the first to die in an air crash when his own handmade balloon exploded over the English Channel.
You can read more about the first passenger flight in history on the website of the American Physical Society.
