In 1782 in France, Joseph Michel Montgolfier filled a silk bag with hot air which, being less dense than the air around it, lifted the bag to the high ceiling of his house. On April 25, 1783, Joseph and his brother Jacques Etienne built a larger, spherical bag, filled it with hot air from a fire and sent several farm animals aloft in a basket hung beneath it. After this success, they created an even larger envelope, and on November 21, 1783 in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris the brothers launched a 70-foot high balloon carrying Jean Francois Piltre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Artandes.
The two men were lifted to 3000 feet, becoming the first humans to experience sustained flight. They remained aloft for 25 minutes and travelled five miles, controlling their own flight by adding straw to the fire. When this accomplishment was widely publicized, the human-carrying balloon evolved quickly. On December 1, 1783, in Paris, Jacques Charles and Noel Roberts flew 27 miles in the first flight of a hydrogen filled balloon. Elizabeth Thible, the first woman to fly in a balloon, went aloft at Lyons, France, on June 4, 1784. The first British-designed balloon was flown by its builder, James Satler, on October 4,1784, and the first balloon flight in the United States was conducted by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard at Philadelphia on January 9, 1793. Blanchard and the American Dr. John Jeffries had been the first humans to fly across the English Channel, on January 7, 1785. (In that same year, Blanchard invented, and first used, the parachute.)
