On this day 228 years ago, the French inventor Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American physician and scientist Dr John Jeffries completed the first human flight over the English Channel, taking off from Dover Castle and landing around 150 minutes later at Guînes, near Calais. The first-ever successful manned balloon flight had occurred just over a year previously, in November 1783, using a hot air balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers.
Jean-Pierre Blanchard used a hydrogen-filled balloon, and his first successful flight was in Paris on 2 March 1784. Rather than settling for where the wind chose to take him, he tried using a pair of wings to “row” the balloon in a particular direction; however, this part of the experiment proved unsuccessful as the forces exerted on the balloon by the air vastly outweighed any force that could be exerted by a human operating the wings.
Blanchard travelled to England later in 1784 and conducted some successful flights leading up to his flight with Dr John Jeffries across the English Channel on 7 January 1785. Later that year he successfully trialled the parachute using a dog as the passenger, and some eight years later he used a parachute to save his own life when his balloon ruptured; however he died in 1809 as a result of injuries sustained the previous year in a fall from a balloon caused by a heart attack.