Today in History, November 21st
On November 21, 1783, two Frenchmen made the first crewed hot-air balloon flight over Paris. Plus the Dayton Accords, Felton, and more.
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November 21 is best known for the first crewed hot-air balloon flight, over Paris in 1783. It is also the day Rebecca Latimer Felton became the first woman seated in the U.S. Senate in 1922, and the day the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War in 1995.
The big story: The first crewed balloon flight (1783)
For all of human history, people had watched birds and wondered. On November 21, 1783, two Frenchmen finally went up. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a young science teacher, and François Laurent, the marquis d’Arlandes, an army officer, lifted off from the grounds of the Château de la Muette at the western edge of Paris. Their craft was a hot-air balloon built by the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, paper-mill owners who had been testing balloons for months. Earlier trials had carried animals or stayed tied to the ground. This one floated free. The two men fed a fire to keep the air inside warm and drifted over the Bois de Boulogne and across the city, staying aloft for roughly 25 minutes and covering about 5.5 miles (9 kilometers) before coming down safely. Crewed flight had begun, more than a century before the airplane.
More events on November 21
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1806 | Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree, launching the Continental System to shut Britain out of European trade. |
| 1877 | Thomas Edison announced his newest invention, the phonograph. |
| 1916 | HMHS Britannic, sister ship of the Titanic, sank in the Aegean Sea while serving as a hospital ship in World War I. |
| 1922 | Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia became the first woman seated in the U.S. Senate. She served one day. |
| 1934 | A teenage Ella Fitzgerald won Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. |
| 1964 | The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Staten Island, opened to traffic. |
| 1980 | Millions of viewers tuned in to Dallas to learn who shot J.R. Ewing. |
| 1995 | The presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia reached the Dayton Accords in Ohio, ending the Bosnian War. |
| 2002 | At a summit in Prague, NATO invited seven Central and Eastern European countries, including the three Baltic states, to join the alliance. |
| 2017 | Robert Mugabe resigned as Zimbabwe’s leader after about 37 years in power, as impeachment proceedings began. |
Born on November 21
- 1694: Voltaire, French writer and satirist of the Enlightenment.
- 1834: Hetty Green, American financier who built a vast fortune on Wall Street.
- 1898: René Magritte, Belgian Surrealist painter.
- 1920: Stan Musial, American baseball player considered one of the game’s greatest hitters.
Sources
- Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, Britannica
- On This Day: November 21, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- This Day in History: November 21, History.com
- Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic, sinks in Aegean Sea, History.com
- Ella Fitzgerald wins Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, History.com
