Nikolai Rezanov
The first flight of a hot air balloon by the brothers Montgolfier in France in 1783, was reported less than four years later by the Dutch in Dejima, and published in the 1787 "Sayings of the Dutch". The new technology was demonstrated in 1805, almost twenty years later, when the Swiss Johann Caspar Horner and the Prussian Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, two scientists of the Krusenstern mission that also brought the Russian ambassador Nikolai Rezanov to Japan, made a hot air balloon out of Japanese paper (washi), and made a demonstration in front of about 30 Japanese delegates. Hot air balloons would mainly remain curiosities, becoming the object of numerous experiments and popular depictions, until the development of military usages during the early Meiji era.