The word aviation was coined forty years before any aeroplane flew
In 1863 Gabriel de La Landelle, a French author who had once served in the navy, published a book titled Aviation, or Aerial Navigation without Balloons. He built the word from the Latin avis, bird, by way of a failed coinage, avier, meaning to fly. Nobody would make a controlled, powered aeroplane flight for another four decades.
Balloons were the only way up in his day. The Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon made the first free flight carrying people on 21 November 1783, but balloons could only drift downwind. Jean-Pierre Blanchard flew a steerable, human-powered balloon in 1784 and crossed the English Channel in one the next year. In 1799 George Cayley described the modern aeroplane in outline: a fixed wing, with separate systems for lift, propulsion and control.
Getting there took decades of partial successes. Otto Lilienthal made the first well-documented, repeated glider flights, beginning near Berlin in 1891, and photographs of him aloft won over sceptical newspapers and scientists; his standard glider was the first aircraft built in series. Clément Ader's bat-winged Éole made a powered hop of about 50 metres on 9 October 1890 but could not be steered. Then on 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers achieved powered, controlled, sustained flight, thanks to their three-axis control system and a light engine of their own. In May 1908 they carried their first passenger, a mechanic named Charles Furnas.
Progress then came fast. Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in 1919 and Lindbergh flew it alone in 1927. The Douglas DC-3 became the first airliner to profit from carrying passengers, and after the Second World War cheap surplus planes and returning pilots fuelled a boom in private flying. The Boeing 707 made jet travel economical, Concorde flew passengers faster than sound for over twenty years, and in 2004 SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded craft to reach space.
Today the numbers are vast: the International Civil Aviation Organization counted 9.5 billion passengers in 2024. Airlines were mostly government-protected flag carriers until the 1970s, when open skies agreements brought competition and lower fares.
Source: Aviation
