January 7

Sometimes it seems to me that the English Channel is always turning up in the context of some first: the first to swim across it, the first aircraft crash while attempting to cross it things like that. On the 7th in 1785, people flew across it for the first time. They were Jean-Pierre Blanchard, from Paris, and John Jeffries[, from Boston. They flew across the channel in a gas-filled balloon. The crossing took the men two and a half hours, give or take a couple of minutes.
Matthew Webb was the first to swim the channel. He did it on the 25th of August in 1875 and he took 21 hours and 45 minutes to do it.
On the 15th of June in 1785, Pilâtre de Rozier and Pierre Romain crashed while attempting to duplicate Blanchard’s success.
Blanchard made his first successful flight on the 2nd of March in 1784, in a hydrogen-filled balloon launched from the Champ de Mars
Jeffries was a surgeon by profession. Following the Boston Massacre he was the defense’s star witness in the matter of the shooting of Patrick Carr, one of the Americans shot and the fifth and last to die on March 17,1770.