Hot air balloon started over two hundred years ago in France when the Montgofier brothers sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster in a rooster in a wicker basketsusended below a paper and silk balloon in the air in 1783 under the decree of King Louis XVI. Many prior test flights gained great excitement in the area and over 400,000 people - virtually the entire population of Paris - attended the first launch in Versailles. The Montgofier brothers constantly fed their fires with straw and sheep''s wool.

As described by Etienne Montgofier, " in four minutes the machine was filled. Everybody let go ( of the balloon ) at once, and the machine rose majestically. Just a moment after lift-off, along came a gust of wind that laid it on its side. At that moment I feared failure. " The balloon recovered and continued to rise, bearing away its live cargo on a light breeze. The  royal audience cheered.

The two astronomers calculated the balloon''s altitude to be 1700 feet before it began to descend toward a forest  two miles away. Several of the spectators hurried along the landing site, where they found that the cage had been jarred open by a branch encountered during the descent and that the animals were loose. The sheep and the duck appeared to survive the experience without a scratch, but the rooster had injured one of its wings during the flight.

The flight pleased the King, but when Etienne Montgofier announced his intention of constructing a man-carrying balloon, His Royal Highness insisted that the passengers be criminals, who would be offered a pardon if they survived the trip.A aristocrat named Francois Pilatre de Rozier objected to the King''s order. Pilatre de Rozier was incensed
that convicted felons were to be offered the glory of being the first men into the air. Instead, he offered himself for the experiment.

Tethered ascents followed, the first of which took Pilatre de Rozier 84 feet in the air. His excitement upon landing, he jumped out of the gallery before the balloon was secured. This event freed the basket of Pilatre de Rozier''s weight, and it promptly ascended back into the air to the end of its tether.

A month later, Pilatre de Rozier, courageously joined by Marquis d''Arlandes, ascend from the garden of the Crown Prince''s palace in nearby Bois de Boulogne. The rose to about 3000 feet. Twenty five minutes after the takeoff, they plopped gently down between two millhouses, slightly more than five miles from where they started.

The hot air balloon may have been the first aircraft, but the gas balloon ws not far behind. Ten days after Professor Charles demonstrated the firt hydrogen balloon in an equally successful ascent from Paris.

Charles''s balloon was a much more practical device than the hot air balloon of those days and differed very little from the majority of gas balloon flying today. For almosy two centuries hot air balloons were virtually ignored until the late 1950s when a balloon was built as part of a United States Government research programme. This balloon was man-made fibres and was filled with air heated by a propane flame. The modern hot air balloon was born.