June 5 – The Montgolfier brothers send up at Annonay, near Lyon, a 900 m linen hot air balloon as a public demonstration. Its flight covers 2 km and lasts 10 minutes, to an estimated altitude of 1600–2000 metres.[5]
November 21 – The first free flight by humans in a balloon is made by Pilâtre de Rozier and Marquis d'Arlandes who fly aloft for 25 minutes about 100 metres above Paris for a distance of 9 km.[5]
December 26 – Louis-Sébastien Lenormand makes the first ever recorded public demonstration of a parachute descent by jumping from the tower of the Montpellier observatory in France using his rigid-framed model which he intends as a form of fire escape.
German physician Melchior Adam Weikard publishes a biography of microscopistWilhelm Friedrich von Gleichen, Biographie des Herrn Wilhelm Friedrich v. Gleichen genannt Rußwurm.
Physics
Jean-Paul Marat publishes Mémoire sur l'électricité médicale ("Memorandum on Medical Electricity").
^ abGillispie, Charles Coulston (1983). The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783-1784. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-08321-6.
^Emsley, John (2001). Nature's Building Blocks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 183–191. ISBN978-0-19-850341-5.
^Brayshay, M.; Grattan, J. (1999). "Environmental and social responses in Europe to the 1783 eruption of the Laki fissure volcano in Iceland: a consideration of contemporary documentary evidence". In Firth, C. R.; McGuire, W. J. (eds.). Volcanoes in the Quaternary. Special Publication, 161. London: Geological Society. pp. 173–187. ISBN978-1-86239-049-2.
^Gale, W.K.V. (1981). Ironworking. Princes Risborough: Shire. pp. 17–19. ISBN978-0-85263-546-9.
^Hunt, David (1992). A History of Preston. Preston: Carnegie. p. 145. ISBN978-0-948789-67-0.