The history of aviation didn't begin with the Wright brothers. It began in a smoky marketplace in southern France, on a June morning in 1783, when two brothers who made paper for a living let go of some ropes and changed the world's understanding of what was possible. This week we go back to that morning — and then follow the thread forward through 129 years of human beings finding new and increasingly audacious things to do with the sky.

We start on June 5th, 1783, with Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier, whose backyard experiments with hot air and linen fabric gave the world its first glimpse of something rising freely into the sky. It would be 120 years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk — but in some meaningful sense, it all started here.

Then we jump to June 2nd, 1910, and a slender man in a fur-lined flight suit standing on the white cliffs of Dover at dawn. Charles Rolls — yes, the Rolls of Rolls-Royce — had a goal nobody had yet attempted: cross the English Channel and come back without landing. What he did that morning was remarkable. What happened to him five weeks later is the kind of story that reminds you how thin the margin was in those early years.

And we close on June 7th, 1912, at College Park, Maryland — still operating today as the oldest continuously operating airport in the world — where two Army officers loaded a Lewis gun into the nose of a Wright biplane and asked a simple, consequential question: can you fire a machine gun from a moving airplane? Just nine years after Kitty Hawk, the answer they found that morning set aviation on a course that would shape the next century of warfare.

Three stories. One hundred and twenty-nine years. From the first thing that ever rose into the sky, to the first weapon fired from one.

Windows of Flight is brought to you by the Border Series — aviation thriller novels by host Eric Ristau. Old bold pilots, vintage aircraft, and plots ripped straight from today's headlines. Find the Border Series wherever books are sold, and learn more at www.ericristau.com.