Robert Brothers' Long-Distance Balloon Flight

Background. Balloon flight in France was still in its infancy in the early 1780s. The Montgolfier brothers developed a hot-air balloon, a lighter-than-air aircraft whose envelope contains heated air, and demonstrated it publicly in Annonay on 4 June 1783 with an unmanned flight lasting ten minutes. After further experiments with unmanned balloons and animal flights, manned flights followed later that year.

First Manned Flights in Paris. The first balloon flight with humans aboard was a tethered ascent performed on or around 15 October 1783 by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier from the yard of the Reveillon workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The first free flight with human passengers followed a few weeks later, on 21 November 1783, when de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes flew in a balloon created by the Montgolfier brothers.

Paris as a Setting. Paris, the capital and largest city of France, hosted the first untethered manned hot air balloon flight in the world, performed there in November 1783 by Pilâtre de Rozier and d'Arlandes. The city's role in these early aeronautical experiments made it the natural departure point for subsequent long-distance attempts, though the supplied passages do not document any such later flight.