page_title: Timeline of aviation – 19th century
section_title: 1870s - 1880s
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of aviation – 19th century / 1870s - 1880s
caption_attribution_description: English: The French officers' Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs ''LA FRANCE airship made the first fully controllable free-flight the 9 August 1884. It was the first full circle flight with landing on the starting point. The astronomer Jules Janssen took this photo from his Meudon (France) astrophysic observatory in 1885. One said LA FRANCE airship was the mythical Flying Dutchman vessel realized.
context_page_description: This is a list of aviation-related events during the 19th century:
context_section_description: 1870
  Balloons are used by the French to transport letters and passengers out of besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Between September 1870 and January 1871, 66 flights – of which 58 land safely – carry 110 passengers and up to three million letters out of Paris, as well as 500 carrier pigeons to deliver messages back to Paris. One balloon accidentally sets a world distance record by ending up off the coast of Norway.
  1871
  The Englishmen Wenham and Browning construct the first wind tunnel and conduct airflow experiments.
  Alphonse Pénaud flies his Planophore, a small rubber-powered model which is designed to have automatic pitch and roll stability.
  1872
  2 February – French naval architect Henri Dupuy de Lôme achieves 9 to 11 km/h (5.6 to 6.8 mph) with his airship driven by a propeller turned by eight men.
  13 December – The German experimenter Paul Haenlein tests the first airship with an internal combustion engine in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, achieving 19 km/h (12 mph); the engine burns coal gas drawn from its balloon. The tests are stopped because of a shortage of money.
  1873
  The New York Daily Graphic sponsors the first attempt in history to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, using a 400,000-cubic foot (11,327-cubic meter) balloon carrying a lifeboat. The attempt is abandoned when the balloon rips and collapses during inflation.
  1874
  20 September – Felix and Louis du Temple de la Croix build a piloted steam-powered monoplane which achieves a short hop after gaining speed by rolling down a ramp.
  1875
  Englishman Thomas Moy tests a tethered aeroplane with a wing span of 4 metres (13 feet) powered by a steam engine.
  German experimenter Paul Haenlein improves his airship by providing it with a car suspended below its framework to accommodate the crew and engine. This will become a standard practice in the design of later dirigibles.
  15 April – In the balloon Zenith, the French Navy officer Théodore Henri Sivel, the French journalist Joseph Crocé-Spinelli, and the French scientist and editor Gaston Tissandier ascend to an altitude of 8,600 metres (28,200 feet). Hypoxia kills Sivel and Crocé-Spinelli during the flight and leaves Tissandier deaf.
  1876
  Alphonse Pénaud and Paul Gauchot apply for a patent for a power-driven aeroplane with a retractable undercarriage, wings with dihedral and joystick control.
  1877
  First flight of a steam-driven model helicopter built by Enrico Forlanini.
  Imperial Japanese Army flying experience begins with the use of balloons.
  1878
  Charles F. Ritchel publicly demonstrates of his hand-powered, one-man rigid airship, and eventually sells five of them.
  At the Balloon Equipment Store at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, British Army Captain James Templer conducts the British Army's first official experiments with an observation balloon. It is considered the birth of British military aviation.
  1879
  The British Army gains its first balloon, the Pioneer.
  Frenchman Victor Tatin builds a power-driven model aeroplane with airscrews and a compressed air motor, successfully flying it off the ground.
  American scientist Edmund Clarence Stedman proposes a rigid airship inspired by the anatomy of a fish, with a framework of steel, brass, or copper tubing and a tractor propeller mounted on the front of the envelope, later changed to an engine with two propellers suspended beneath the framework. The airship never is built, but Stedman's design foreshadows that of the Zeppelins of World War I.
  Biot makes short hops in the Biot-Massia glider.
  1880
  The Russian naval officer Alexander Fjodorowitsch Mozhaiski patents a steam-powered aircraft.
  Friedrich Wölfert and Ernst Baumgarten attempt to fly a powered dirigible in free flight, but crash.
  Balloons are used in British military manoeuvres for the first time at Aldershot.
  1883
  M.A. Goupil proposes a steam-powered monoplane with tractor propeller. His full-size test rig lifts itself and two men in a light breeze, but the design is never built.
  The first electric-powered flight is made by Gaston Tissandier who fits a Siemens AG electric motor to a dirigible. Airships with e
caption: The astronomer Jules Janssen took this photo of the French officers' Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs La France dirigible from his Meudon astrophysic observatory in 1885.
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