Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier

Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier (1740-1810 and 1745-1799), French brothers, inventors of a practical hot-air balloon. Born in Annonay, in southern France, the Montgolfiers were paper manufacturers. Their first successful tests of a model balloon were made in private in 1782. (They were unaware that a successful model had been demonstrated before John V, King of Portugal, in Lisbon by Father Bartolomeu de Gusmao on August 8, 1709.) The Montgolfiers’ first public demonstration took place at Annonay on June 4, 1783, when a paper-lined sackcloth balloon, with a diameter of about 10.5 m (35 ft) rose to 915 m (3,000 ft) and travelled over 2.4 km (1y mi). On September 19, 1783, they sent aloft the first living occupants, a sheep, a duck, and a cock, before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles. The animals were unharmed by their 3.2-km (2-mi) flight.

A scientifically minded Academician, François Pilâtre de Rozier, became the first human being to fly when he rose 26 m (84 ft) in a tethered balloon built by the Montgolfiers on October 15, 1783. On November 21 he made the first free manned flight, in company with the Marquis d’Arlandes, from the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. The balloon was equipped with a fire-basket, which the two men supplied with fuel to keep the air in the canopy hot. The aeronauts remained airborne for 25 minutes, probably reaching a maximum height of 450 m (1,500 ft), and drifted back and forth over Paris before descending on the Butte-aux-Calais, some 8.5 km (5.3 mi) from their point of ascent. The Montgolfiers themselves never ascended in one of their balloons.