The first people ever to travel in a hot air balloon were the Montgolfier brothers. The family were paper makers. One of them, Joseph, was an inventor. In 1777 Joseph watched laundry drying over a fire and hot pockets on clothes billowed upwards because they had trapped some hot air from the fire. At the time, people did not really understand how this worked. Montgolfier believed that contained within the smoke was a special gas, which he called ‘Montgolfier Gas’, with a special property he called levity. Also he did not know about the Asian developments centuries earlier.

To try out his idea of being able to carry people in the air, he made a frame of very thin wood and covered the sides and top with lightweight cloth. Under the bottom he lit some paper. The ‘balloon’ rose off its stand and hit the ceiling. Both brothers then built a 3 times larger model that floated 2km. It was then that they chose a balloon-shaped bag instead of a box. It was made of sackcloth with three thin layers of paper inside and held together by 1,800 buttons! A reinforcing fish net covered the outside of the balloon. By making this flight public, they could claim to have invented flight.