Lagâri Hasan Çelebi

Lagâri Hasan Çelebi was an Ottoman engineer credited, according to the seventeenth century traveler Evliya Çelebi's account, with carrying out what may be history's earliest crewed rocket flight. The record states that in 1633 he launched from Sarayburnu near Topkapi Palace in Istanbul aboard a seven-winged rocket propelled by roughly 64 kilograms of gunpowder, and that he was reported to have landed safely in the sea afterward, an account for which he was rewarded by Sultan Murad IV with silver and a military rank. The story sits at the root of the long history of rocket-powered flight experimentation, well before rocketry became a formal engineering discipline, and it is treated in the transport atlas as an early and frequently cited episode in that lineage rather than a settled modern engineering achievement. The available Wikipedia article itself carries an accuracy dispute notice, and later attempts, including a MythBusters recreation, found the feat difficult to reproduce with the materials described, so this entry records the claim as historically significant and widely repeated rather than independently verified.