Elizabeth Thible's Hot Air Balloon Flight
- When
- 1784
- Where
- Lyon, France
- Episodes
- 1
On 4 June 1784, Élisabeth Thible became the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon, riding from Lyon with Monsieur Fleurant aboard La Gustave, a balloon named in honour of King Gustav III of Sweden's visit to the city.
Episodes
Background and detail
Background. The hot air balloon was the first successful human-carrying flight technology, developed by the Montgolfier brothers, who demonstrated it publicly at Annonay in 1783. The first untethered crewed flight took place in Paris on 21 November 1783, flown by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes.
The Flight. On 4 June 1784, eight months after the first crewed balloon flight, Élisabeth Thible flew with a Monsieur Fleurant aboard a hot air balloon christened La Gustave, named in honour of King Gustav III of Sweden's visit to Lyon. This made her the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon.
Élisabeth Thible. Élisabeth Thible, also recorded as Elizabeth Tible, was born Estrieux in Lyon on 8 March 1757 and died on 13 February 1785. Her 1784 balloon flight came less than a year before her death.
People involved
- Élisabeth Thible · passenger, first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon
- Monsieur Fleurant · fellow passenger on La Gustave
Sources
- Élisabeth Thible Wikipedia, revision of 2025-12-23
- Hot air balloon Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-26
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.