The Montgolfier brothers flew the first public hot-air balloon
On this day · 4 June 1783
On June 4, 1783, two French paper-makers sent an empty linen bag of hot air a mile across the sky and opened the age of flight.
On June 4, 1783, brothers Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier gathered a crowd of local dignitaries in the marketplace at Annonay, France, and gave the first public demonstration of a hot-air balloon. Their craft, a roughly 33-foot globe of linen lined with paper, was inflated by burning straw and wool beneath its open mouth.
The brothers, who ran a paper-making business, had noticed that hot air rising into a bag made it lift, though they wrongly believed the smoke itself held a special buoyant property. Whatever the cause, the result was spectacular: the unmanned balloon climbed perhaps a thousand meters and drifted more than a mile before settling, and burning, to the ground.
No passengers, no pilot, just hot air and astonishment.
The Annonay flight launched a feverish year of ballooning. Within months the Montgolfiers were lofting a sheep, a rooster, and a duck at Versailles, and by November humans were aloft over Paris.
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