First in Flight

“First in Flight” is a phrase I saw lot growing up. My home state’s neighbor to the north—North Carolina—still has this today as an option for everyone’s license plates.

They’re talking about Wilbur and Orville Wright, another one of those dynamic duos who shaped history. Those brothers owned a bicycle shop, where they built the first airplane that worked, and they flew it themselves in Kitty Hawk, a town in NC near the beach.

120 years earlier, just as the American Revolutionary War had just drawn to a close, and four years before the Constitution was written, the first human beings flew overhead in a controlled manner. Their names were Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes, and they flew in a hot air balloon.

I was able to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum last year. This place is worth a visit if you can make it! The history of flight is right there before your eyes:

The airplanes are overwhelmingly cool to see up close. You can get within a few feet of legendary planes crucial in the development of the history of flight. Unfortunately, airplanes have tended to hold up a lot better than balloons, so the coolest thing I found while I was there was a tale of what happened during the lead-up to the first human flight.

It turns out that France in 1783 was not ready for this!

And here they are, killing the mysterious demon that had fallen from the sky:

Not an auspicious beginning, but after these early test flights, it wasn’t long until animals were put in the test-pilot’s chair, just as they would be for virtually all tests on a new flight medium from here on out. A sheep, a duck, and a rooster all went up in the air and successfully landed on the ground, in a balloon designed by two brothers, Joseph and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.

While the Wright brothers leveraged their knowledge of bicycles in order to help make their airplane more robust and effective, the Montgolfier brothers leaned on Joseph-Michel’s experience running a paper mill. This knowledge undoubtedly came in handy when they constructed the balloon's envelope from silk and paper.

Just like the Wright brothers, the Montgolfier brothers were all about experimentation. They were able to put together the concept of the envelope, the basket, and the fire source that’s still used in hot air and gas balloons today, largely based on their curiosity and relentless persistence.

Finally, these experiments led to the unmanned demonstrations I mentioned earlier, including the killing of demons from the sky. Then, on November 21, 1783, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes took off in the balloon the Montgolfier brothers had designed.

The balloon left the ground in Paris. While the passengers could make the balloon go up or down by stoking the fire or dampening it, they had zero control over the direction—that was entirely up to the wind.

Fortunately, they landed after about 25 minutes of flight, and a little over 5 miles traveled.

Hot air balloons weren’t the only thing that gave the Wright brothers the confidence they needed to try to fly. Gliders played a major role during the 19th century, with the principles of aeronautics being instrumental in understanding how to fly.

You can see a really cool early 20th century glider here, reminiscent of the eventual Stealth Bomber! Glider technology has continued to evolve right up to the present day.

Gliders were the inverse of those early balloons: you could control the direction to a degree, but you couldn’t climb up on your own power.

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about the first actual controlled flight, although controlled is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Try to imagine the sense of profound wonder and terror those two first balloon flyers must have felt, or the sense of ominous mystery folks on the ground must have felt when they saw the demon in the sky!