The first people to fly in a hot air balloon took off from Paris on 21 November 1783, in a paper-lined balloon built by the Montgolfier brothers. But the idea of using hot air to lift something into the sky is far older, and the story since then takes in record-breaking flights across oceans and around the world. Here's the history of the hot air balloon, from Chinese lanterns to the balloon you can fly in today.
The first hot air balloons were sky lanterns in China. Small paper lanterns lifted by a flame were used for military signalling well over a thousand years ago. Tradition credits the strategist Zhuge Liang, in the 3rd century AD, which is why they're still known as Kongming lanterns.
The first balloon to carry people was invented by Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier, two brothers from a paper-making family in Annonay, in the south of France. They noticed that heated air made paper and fabric bags rise, and in June 1783 they flew an unmanned balloon in front of a crowd in their home town.
Nobody knew whether a living creature could survive at altitude, so on 19 September 1783 the Montgolfiers sent up a sheep, a duck and a rooster at the Palace of Versailles, watched by King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The flight lasted about eight minutes, and all three animals landed safely.
Two months later, the scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes became the first people to fly. They took off from the Château de la Muette in Paris in a Montgolfier balloon, feeding a straw fire to keep the air hot, and stayed aloft for about 25 minutes, travelling around 5 miles across the city.
Just ten days later, on 1 December 1783, Jacques Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert made the first flight in a hydrogen gas balloon, a different kind of balloon filled with a gas lighter than air rather than hot air.
The first balloon flight in Britain was made by James Tytler, who flew a hot air balloon in Edinburgh on 27 August 1784. A few weeks later, on 15 September 1784, the Italian Vincenzo Lunardi took off from London in a hydrogen balloon, watched by an enormous crowd. In January 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries crossed the English Channel by gas balloon.
Early ballooning was dangerous. In June 1785, Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to fly, was killed with Pierre Romain when their balloon caught fire while attempting to cross the Channel from France.
For more than 150 years, gas balloons dominated, because early hot air balloons couldn't carry enough fuel to fly for long. That changed in the 1950s, when the American engineer Ed Yost developed a balloon with a propane burner and a synthetic fabric envelope. His first free flight, in October 1960, created the modern hot air balloon.
Britain soon caught on. The first modern hot air balloon built in the UK, the Bristol Belle, flew in 1967, and Bristol has been at the heart of British ballooning ever since. Cameron Balloons, founded in the city in 1971, became one of the world's biggest balloon makers, and the first Bristol International Balloon Fiesta was held in 1979.
Today, hot air balloons are mostly flown for pleasure. In the UK, passenger flights are regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority and flown by commercially licensed pilots. The basic idea hasn't changed since 1783, though: heat the air, and the balloon rises.
Want to be part of the story? Read how hot air balloons fly, our fascinating ballooning facts, or see where you can take a balloon ride in England.
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