Henri Giffard flew the first powered airship
On this day · 24 September 1852
On September 24, 1852, a French engineer bolted a steam engine to a hydrogen balloon and steered it across the sky near Paris.
On September 24, 1852, French engineer Henri Giffard climbed aboard a cigar-shaped, hydrogen-filled balloon slung beneath a 3-horsepower steam engine and drifted away from the Paris Hippodrome. By the time he came down near Trappes, about 17 miles away, he had achieved something no one had before: the first powered, steerable flight.
The craft was no greyhound. It crept along at roughly 6 miles per hour, and the wind that day was simply too strong for Giffard to fight his way home against it.
Yet he could turn, circle, and hold a heading, proving a machine in the air could be guided rather than merely carried.
That distinction mattered. A steam engine driving a propeller turned a balloon, at the mercy of the breeze, into a dirigible, something a pilot could aim. Giffard flew his proof of concept more than half a century before the Wright brothers, opening the long road toward the airships that would later cross oceans.
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