When you think of aircraft carriers, many of you probably imagine a monstrous ship with an entire airfield on board, rather than a huge blimp capable of housing several planes at once.
But people in the 19th century apparently thought otherwise. That is why the aircraft carrier in our usual understanding appeared even later than the first attempts to fit airplanes into a giant oval floating in the sky.
In 1852, Meunier, a Frenchman, made the first flight on a new type of aircraft - an airship, after which it was replaced by a military subspecies with an electric engine, thanks to the joint efforts of two inventors named Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs. They made flying an airship fully controllable. This happened in 1884.
And while the Germans were busy poring over their zeppelin, starting in 1899, and Count von Zepellin was complaining about having had squandered his entire fortune on a project that was named after him, French engineer Alberto Santos-Dumont was already admiring the Eiffel Tower from a bird's eye view from an airship at a speed just over 13 miles per hour.