Departures of note

On March 19, 1742, Jean-François Boyvin de Bonnetot, Marquis de Bacqueville, attempted to fly across the river Seine using wings he had equipped himself with. Launching from the roof of a hotel, he briefly hovered about 300 meters above the water before falling into a barge and breaking his leg. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau witnessed the event and recorded it in his biographical writings.

Born in 1688 in Bacqueville-en-Caux, Normandy, Boyvin was a French inventor who pursued the dream of human flight decades before the first successful glider flights. His 1742 attempt over the Seine was a dramatic and public demonstration of his ambitions, though it ended in injury rather than triumph.

Boyvin died in 1760 in a house fire in Paris. His flight attempt, though unsuccessful, was remembered as one of the more daring early experiments in aviation, capturing the imagination of contemporaries like Rousseau.