Montgolfier Brothers Soar: Humanity Takes Flight

Brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier watched a linen-and-paper globe rise roughly 6,000 feet above the marketplace at Annonay, France, on June 4, 1783. The unmanned balloon, about 33 feet in diameter, stayed aloft for ten minutes and traveled a mile and a half before settling in a vineyard. A crowd of local dignitaries witnessed the demonstration and drafted an official report that was sent to the Academie des Sciences in Paris. Humanity had just learned to fly. The Montgolfiers were wealthy paper manufacturers from a family of sixteen children. Joseph, the dreamer, had noticed that heated air caused laundry to billow upward on a drying line, and he began experimenting with small paper bags held over a fire. He believed the smoke itself contained a special lifting gas he called "Montgolfier gas." The brothers never fully understood that ordinary hot air, being less dense than the cooler air around it, provided the lift. Their ignorance of the mechanism did not prevent them from engineering an effective aircraft. News of the Annonay demonstration electrified Paris and triggered a race. Physicist Jacques Charles, who correctly understood buoyancy, responded by building a hydrogen balloon that flew unmanned from the Champ de Mars on August 27. The Montgolfiers countered with increasingly ambitious demonstrations for King Louis XVI at Versailles. On September 19, they launched a balloon carrying a sheep, a duck, and a rooster to test whether living creatures could survive at altitude. The animals landed safely, though the rooster reportedly suffered an injured wing. The first manned flight came on November 21, 1783, when Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes flew a Montgolfier hot air balloon over Paris for 25 minutes, covering about five miles. Within two years, balloonists had crossed the English Channel. The Montgolfier brothers had launched a technology that would evolve from carnival spectacle to military reconnaissance to the foundation of modern aviation.