Short answers, pulled from the story.
Marco Polo described these techniques in 1282. He documented methods used extensively in ancient China that often resulted in crippling or lethal injuries when people constructed wings and jumped from towers.
Sir George Cayley lived between 1773 and 1857 and is widely acknowledged as the founder of modern aeronautics. He published a landmark three-part treatise titled On Aerial Navigation from 1809 to 1810, identified four vector forces influencing aircraft, and developed the conventional fixed-wing aeroplane form with stabilizing tails.
Otto Lilienthal began human flight in Berlin during 1891. His work led to development of the modern wing and established his company Maschinenfabrik Otto Lilienthal as the world's first airplane manufacturer through repeated successful flights with gliders.
Aerodynamics falls broadly into three categories based on speed relative to sound waves. Incompressible flow occurs at subsonic speeds below Mach 1, compressible flow happens above Mach 1 where shock waves appear, and transonic flow exists in intermediate ranges around Mach 1.
The Montgolfier brothers were invited to demonstrate before the French Académie des Sciences in 1783. They had previously begun experimenting with paper balloons made of steam and hot smoky air called electric smoke during the mid-eighteenth century.