Joseph-Michel & Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier
1740-1810 / 1745-1799
Who
Paper manufacturers from Annonay, France, who invented the hot-air balloon - and made the first confirmed ascent by humans, 21 November 1783.
Why it matters
Their first public flight (4 June 1783) was unmanned; by 19 September they had flown the first living passengers before the royal family at Versailles - a sheep, a duck and a rooster, landed safely and pardoned on the spot. On 21 November Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes rose over Paris for about 25 minutes and 9 km, with a firefighter aboard for the burning straw. They believed the lifting agent was smoke itself; Jacques Charles identified hot hydrogen as the real answer within a fortnight - the first lesson of aviation being that the machine can outrun the theory, a sentence rockets will repeat two centuries later.
Lineage
Flight begins here. Balloons gave humans the sky; Cayley gave them the wing; the Wrights married the two - and every launch list in this collection starts in those eleven months of 1783, when the ground stopped being the end of travel.