On November 21, 1783, physics teacher Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and army officer Francois Laurent, the Marquis d'Arlandes, lifted off from the Bois de Boulogne in a Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon, achieving the first sustained, untethered flight by humans in history. Watched by a crowd including Benjamin Franklin, the linen and paper balloon carried them roughly 9 kilometers across Paris in about 25 minutes before landing safely, opening the age of aviation.
The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, were paper manufacturers who had noticed how smoke and hot air lifted objects, and spent 1783 testing balloons on animals and tethered flights. King Louis XVI reportedly wanted the first human aviators to be condemned criminals, reasoning their lives were expendable, but Pilatre de Rozier, appalled at the idea of criminals receiving the glory of flight, petitioned for the honor to go to himself instead.
On the appointed day, the balloon, nearly 23 meters tall and decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis and zodiac signs, rose from the grounds of the Chateau de la Muette. Franklin, then American minister to France, watched from below, apparently remarking that the achievement would soon make such spectacles commonplace, though he likely underestimated how quickly.
De Rozier and d'Arlandes fed straw into a brazier suspended beneath the balloon's neck to keep it aloft, occasionally scorching holes in the fabric that d'Arlandes patted out with a wet sponge. They cleared the rooftops of Paris, alarmed onlookers below, and touched down beyond the city walls, having proven, against centuries of assumption, that human beings could leave the ground and return alive.