Seventy-four years before the Montgolfier brothers, a hot air balloon rose to a palace ceiling in Lisbon. More than a thousand years before that, small paper balloons were drifting over Chinese battlefields. The 1783 flights in France get the glory, and mostly deserve it, but the idea of hot air lifting a light envelope is far older. This page is about the ancestors: lanterns, priests and one beautiful machine that could never work.
The oldest hot air balloon is a paper lantern
A sky lantern is not like a hot air balloon. It is one, at miniature scale: a paper envelope, a light frame, a small flame, and the same physics that lifts a modern balloon over Cappadocia. In China these are called Kongming lanterns, and they were reportedly used for military signalling as early as the third century. The name honours Zhuge Liang, the strategist whose courtesy name was Kongming and who, the story goes, used lanterns to call for help when surrounded. That origin is a legend, and historians treat it as one; the lanterns themselves are real and old. Today they rise by the thousand at festivals like Yi Peng in Thailand and Pingxi in Taiwan, small cousins of the big balloon festivals on the other side of the family tree.
A priest, a king and a ball of hot air
The best documented pre-Montgolfier flight belongs to Bartolomeu Lourenco de Gusmao, a priest born in colonial Brazil in 1685. On 8 August 1709, in a hall of the Casa da India in Lisbon, he demonstrated a small device before King John V of Portugal and his court: a light envelope inflated by burning material carried beneath it. It rose about four metres toward the ceiling before servants, reportedly worried about the curtains catching fire, knocked it down. Contemporary accounts record the event, which makes this the first documented hot air flight of any kind: indoors, at model scale, 74 years before Annonay and Versailles. The king was impressed enough to grant Gusmao exclusive rights over flying machines. The principle worked. Nobody, including Gusmao, managed to scale it up.
The Passarola, a myth with wings
Gusmao is also remembered for a machine that never existed in the air: the Passarola, a bird-shaped flying ship with a hull, a tail and a canopy, sketched while he petitioned the king for support. Prints of it spread across Europe and grew stranger with every copy. There is no evidence it ever flew, and some historians suspect the surviving design was partly a decoy to protect his real experiments. Keep the two stories separate: the indoor demonstration of 1709 is documented fact, the soaring Passarola is myth. Gusmao left aeronautics within a few years and died in Toledo in 1724.
The airship physics forbids
Even earlier, in 1670, the Jesuit professor Francesco Lana de Terzi published a design for an aerial ship lifted by four copper spheres, each pumped empty of air. The logic is sound: a vacuum weighs nothing, so a sealed sphere lighter than the air it displaces would float. The engineering is impossible. Atmospheric pressure crushes any sphere with walls thin enough to be light enough, a problem no material has solved to this day. Still, Lana's little book treated flight as a calculation rather than a dream, with weights, volumes and buoyancy worked out line by line, and it shaped serious thinking about lighter-than-air travel for a century. He also predicted that flying machines would one day drop weapons on cities, and argued God would prevent the invention for exactly that reason. For the physics that did work in the end, see how balloons generate lift.
A speculation from the desert
One modern footnote, and it is speculation, clearly labelled: in 1975 the writer Jim Woodman and balloonist Julian Nott built Condor I, a balloon made from fabric plausible for ancient Peru, to test whether the Nazca people could in principle have flown smoke balloons above their huge desert drawings. It flew, briefly. That proves such a flight is possible with early materials, not that it ever happened. There is no archaeological evidence that the Nazca flew anything at all.
From lantern to basket
The idea is ancient, the ride is modern. See how a first flight works today, and what all those centuries of experiments finally paid for.
Early flight FAQ
Did anyone fly before the Montgolfier brothers?
No human made a free flight before 21 November 1783. But hot air devices flew much earlier: Chinese sky lanterns from roughly the third century onward, and Bartolomeu de Gusmao's small indoor balloon in Lisbon on 8 August 1709.
Is a sky lantern really a hot air balloon?
Yes, in miniature. A flame heats the air inside a paper envelope, the warm air weighs less than the air it displaces, and the lantern rises. A modern balloon does exactly the same thing with propane and ripstop nylon.
What was the Passarola and did it ever fly?
The Passarola was a bird-shaped flying ship sketched by Gusmao around 1709. It never flew. His documented achievement is the small hot air model that rose indoors before King John V; the Passarola remained a famous drawing.
Why was Lana de Terzi's vacuum airship impossible?
His 1670 design relied on copper spheres emptied of air. To be light enough to float, their walls would have to be so thin that atmospheric pressure would crush them. No known material escapes this trap, so the vacuum airship stays on paper.