The first known human flight was made in Paris in 1783. Jean-François Pilatier de Rosier and the Marquis de Arlandes flew 8 km in a balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers, filled with hot air. The balloon was heated by fire from burning wood and was not controlled, that is, it moved on the will of the wind.

Work on the development of a controlled balloon (dirigible) (which was called an airship) continued throughout the 1800s. The first controlled apparatus equipped with a steam engine, lighter than air, flew in 1852, when the Frenchman Giffard flew 24 kilometers.

Unguided balloons were used during the American Civil War by the Union Army.

The next technological breakthrough was made in 1884, when the first fully controlled free flight on a French military airship with an electric engine La France by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs was carried out. The airship was 52 m long and had a volume of 1,900 m³, covering a distance of 8 km in 23 minutes with an 8 1/2 hp engine.

Nevertheless, these apparatuses were short-lived and extremely unstable. Regular controlled flights were not made until the advent of the internal combustion engine.

However, airships were used in both World Wars I and II, and continue in limited use today, but their development was largely stymied by the development of heavier-than-air vehicles.

The first printed publication on aviation was Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Sketches of a Machine for Flying by Air, published in 1716. This flying machine consisted of a light frame with a strong cloth stretched over it and had two large oars or wings moving on horizontal axes in such a way that they met no resistance when moving upward and created lifting force when moving downward. Swedenborg knew that this machine would not fly, but he regarded it as a starting point and was confident that the problem would be solved. He said:

it seems easier to talk about such a machine than to actually create it, since it requires more force and less weight than the human body has. The science of mechanics could perhaps suggest a way, namely the use of a strong spiral spring. If these advantages and requirements were attained, perhaps one day someone would be able to figure out how to make better use of our sketch and find a way to make additions that would achieve what we can only suggest. Still, there is ample evidence and examples in nature where such flight can be safe, yet when the time comes for the first trials, you will probably have to pay for the experience, but you cannot get by with the strength of your arms or legs.

Swedenborg showed in his work that having an engine in a flying machine is the most important condition for flight.

In the last years of the 18th century Sir George Cayley made the first serious study of the physics of flight. In 1799.

He created a diagram of a glider which, with the exception of the vertical projection, corresponded fully to modern ones, its tail being used for steering and the pilot being below the center of mass to ensure flight stabilization; this model flew in 1804. Over the next fifty years Cayley continued to work on the physics of flight, during which time he learned most of the basics of aerodynamics and introduced such terms as lift and drag. He used internal and external combustion engines that used gunpowder as fuel, but settled on Alphonse Penot’s rubbermotor, which allowed him to make engine models more easily. Cayley later used his research to build a full-scale machine which flew unmanned in 1849, and in 1853 an already manned short flight was made in Brompton, near Scarborough in Yorkshire.

In 1848, John Stringfellow made a successful test flight of a model with a steam engine, at Chard, Somerset, England. This model was unmanned.

In 1868, Jean-Marie Le Brie, a Frenchman, made the first flight in which he climbed above the starting point, in his L’Albatros artificiel glider using horse-drawn shore power. Le Brie reportedly reached an altitude of 100 meters, covering a distance of 200 meters.

In 1874, Felix du Temple in Brest, France, built a Monoplane, a large aircraft made of aluminum, with a wingspan of 13 meters and weighing 80 kg (without a pilot). Several tests were performed, the glider was launched from a springboard, the flight lasted a short time and returned safely.

Another man who contributed to the art of flight was Francis Herbert Wenham, who tried unsuccessfully to build a number of unmanned gliders. He found that the greater contribution to lift from a bird-like wing is made at its front end, from which he concluded that long and thin wings would be more efficient than the bat-like wings commonly used by his colleagues because they have a greater leading edge relative to their weight. Today, this characteristic is known as relative wing elongation. He presented his research to the newly formed Royal Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1866 and decided to get practical confirmation by building the world’s first wind tunnel in 1871. The Society members used the wind tunnel and determined that curved wings had significantly better lift than expected from Cayley’s research based on Newtonian mechanics, and the aerodynamic quality at 15 degrees was approximately 5:1. Thus the possibility of practical construction of heavier-than-air vehicles was clearly demonstrated; there remained, however, problems of propulsion and flight control.