On September 24, 1852, Henri Giffard took off from the Hippodrome in Paris in a cigar-shaped balloon 44 metres long and 12 metres across, driven by a small steam engine turning a three-bladed propeller, and flew to Trappes, about 27 kilometres away. The trip took about three hours, which gives an airspeed of roughly 10 kilometres an hour. It was the first time anyone had flown a powered, steerable aircraft.
The problem Giffard solved was the one that had stopped everyone else. Balloons had been flying since 1783, and they went wherever the wind took them, because nobody had a way to push one hard enough to matter. Giffard had a steam engine of his own design, one of the lightest built up to that point: about 45 horsepower, weighing perhaps 250 kilograms with its boiler and fuel, so roughly the weight of a horse.
The danger was obvious. He knew it. An open flame under a bag of hydrogen is a bomb, so he put the firebox in a closed metal chamber, ran a pipe from it up to a chimney that pointed downwards and away from the envelope, and put a wire gauze over the opening to stop sparks. He also had a vertical rudder at the back and a triangular sail forward, and he used the propeller and the rudder together, which is what made the thing steerable.
It was barely steerable. The flight was made in a light wind, and Giffard could not make much progress against it; he could turn, and he could climb and descend by valving gas or dropping ballast, and that was about it. He said afterwards that he had shown the possibility of steering rather than that he had steered.
He showed the difficulty. Giffard was a manufacturer of injectors and precision instruments who had made his money in railways, and he spent most of it on aeronautics. He built a larger airship in 1855, which crashed, and he invented the injector that fed water into locomotive boilers, which is what he is mainly remembered for in engineering. He went blind in the 1880s and killed himself in 1882.
The line from him runs through the 1880s. Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs flew La France in 1884 with an electric motor, and it was the first airship to return to its starting point. Then the internal combustion engine arrived, then Alberto Santos-Dumont, then the Zeppelins. Giffard's flight is the first entry in the record of heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air powered flight both.