Death of an Early Aviator

November 18, 1724 - It was on this day that Bartolomeu de Gusmão died. He was a Brazilian-born priest and naturalist, but he was also an aviation pioneer.

When he was 24 years old, he reached out to King of Portugal with a proposal to build a flying machine. It’s unclear if a prototype was ever built, but there is a written account from 1720 of Bartolomeu testing some kind of a hot air balloon in Lisbon that definitely got off the ground, with the aviator in tow.

Unfortunately the Portugese inquisition set its sights on Bartolomeu and pegged him as wizard dabbling in dark arts, so the inventor fled to Spain, where he keeled over from a bad fever.