Joseph-Michel Montgolfier

Joseph-Michel Montgolfier was the elder of the two brothers who built the first aircraft to carry human beings. Born in Annonay in 1740, the twelfth of sixteen children of a prosperous paper manufacturer, he was the family's dreamer and its poor businessman — he ran away as a boy, failed at several ventures, and was repeatedly bailed out by his brothers. He was the one with the idea. Watching laundry drying over a fire billow upward, and reflecting on Joseph Priestley's work on gases, he concluded that smoke contained a substance that rose. He was wrong about the mechanism — it is simply that heated air is less dense — but the error did not matter, and in November 1782 he built a small taffeta box in Avignon that lifted to the ceiling. He wrote to his brother Étienne to prepare paper and rope, saying he would show him one of the most astonishing sights in the world. They demonstrated publicly at Annonay on 4 June 1783 with a linen and paper globe, and in September flew a sheep, a duck and a cockerel before Louis XVI at Versailles to test whether animals could survive at altitude. On 21 November 1783 Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes made the first free manned flight, over Paris, staying up about twenty-five minutes. Joseph did not fly on that occasion, and made only one ascent in his life, in 1784. He continued inventing, producing the hydraulic ram in 1796, a pump that uses the momentum of flowing water to lift a portion of it without any external power, and a calorimeter. He died in 1810.

• Lived: 1740 CE – 1810 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: inventor, engineer