balloonists

205d

#OTD in 1782.

The Montgolfier brothers first test fly an unmanned hot air balloon in France; it floats nearly 2.5 km (1.6 mi).

They invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, globe aérostatique, which launched the first confirmed piloted ascent by humans in 1783, carrying Jacques-Étienne.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon

#technology #aviation #balloonists

Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Description des expériences assembles first-hand observations, research, technical descriptions, letters, tables, diagrams, and illustrations related to the groundbreaking experiments in balloon flight in the 1780's. French geologist Faujas de Saint-Fond was an early supporter of work by French inventor Jacques Alexandre César Charles (1746-1823), French brothers Anne-Jean Robert (1758-1820) and Nicolas-Louis Robert (1760-1820), and French brothers Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740-1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745-1799), establishing public subscriptions to fundraise for their experiments in hydrogen and hot air balloon technologies. The plates are bound in the book out of numerical order, placed near the passages in the text where they are discussed. Plate 5 functions as the frontispiece. Seven of the nine plates are numbered with Roman numerals, two with Arabic numerals (plates 5 and 8).

This file was contributed to Wikimedia Commons by Science History Institute as part of a cooperation project

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