Piloted flight began with balloons, not airplanes
Chinese kites may be the oldest human flight machines, centuries before the Common Era. Leonardo sketched flying devices that stayed unworkable. Real piloted ascent came in 1783 France with Montgolfier hot air and Charles’s hydrogen balloons—decades before the Wrights’ 1903 powered aeroplane.
Kite flying in China, possibly from the fifth century BCE with makers such as Mozi and Lu Ban, used silk and bamboo for lift, signaling, and even man-lifting. Sky lanterns applied rising hot air by the third century BCE; Zhuge Liang allegedly used them to frighten foes. Tower jumpers from Abbas ibn Firnas in ninth-century Córdoba to Eilmer of Malmesbury usually crashed for want of a tail. Leonardo studied bird flight and sketched ornithopters, gliders, and parachutes, yet his notes stayed unpublished until 1797 and underestimated needed power.
Between June and December 1783 France stacked firsts: the Montgolfiers’ unmanned hot-air flight at Annonay on 4 June reached nearly three thousand feet; Jacques Charles’s hydrogen balloon flew on 27 August; Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes made the first free human flight on 21 November, drifting eight kilometers; Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert then flew a manned hydrogen craft thirty-six kilometers on 1 December before Charles soloed to about three thousand meters. The word aviation was coined in 1863 by Guillaume de La Landelle.
Nineteenth-century glider work by George Cayley, Otto Lilienthal, and Octave Chanute taught wing control. In 1903 the Wright brothers combined wings, control, and power into the first aeroplane; the familiar cruciform-tail layout solidified by 1909. Zeppelin rigid airships then dominated long routes until the 1930s, succeeded by flying boats and later land jets. Late-century fly-by-wire and twenty-first-century drones extended the story Leonardo could only draw.
Source: History of aviation
