On the morning of December 17th 1903 at Kitty Hawk North Carolina the American inventor Orville Wright (1871-1948) made the first airplane flight in history. The plane was built by him and his brother Wilbur (1867-1912) and flew for a total of 850 feet just barely off the ground and moved so slow that Wilbur ran along side him as it was in the air for just under a minute.
This is the beginning of airplane flight but not the beginning of air flight or even human flight for that matter. Most people when you ask them who the first to fly was will quickly respond that the Wright brothers were. Orville Wright was the first human to fly in an airplane but not the first human to fly. The Wright brothers have this distinction mainly because of the fact that they began our airplane industry as it exists today.
Thousands of people flew in the air before the Wright brothers just not in anything heavier than air. They flew in vehicles lighter than air. Actually they floated more than flew.
On July 2nd 1900 the German born inventor Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin (1838-1917) successfully launched a gondola hanging under a hydrogen filled cigar shaped balloon bag. This was called a dirigible balloon or dirigible from the Latin word meaning, "To direct" or simply called a Zeppelin after the inventor.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s commercial air flight consisted of dirigibles that thousands of people flew in. Dirigible flight lasted until its prime when on may 6th 1937 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Manchester, New Jersey when the Hindenburg dirigible which was the largest one ever built burst into flames as it was docking killing 36 of the 100 passengers and crew.
But human flight began even earlier than this and it began in a simple balloon.
On January 7th 1785 the French scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1754-1785) and a crew of two others crossed the English Channel in a balloon that utilized the method of heat from fire to fill the balloon to this make it lighter than air.
Nearly 5 months later to the day on june15th 1785 when Pilatre was returning across the English Channel the fire caught the balloon’s fabric and he fell about a mile to his death. Making him ironically both the first human to fly in the air and the first human to die in a vehicle that flew through in air.
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