The first rockets date back to 1232.

Incendiary arrows in China

In the Middle Ages, China was a technology leader in explosives. Gunpowder was invented in China as early as the ninth century CE, and the Chinese were also the first to use it to propel weapons — the earliest known rockets.

During the Battle of Kai-Keng (also called the Siege of Kaifeng) in 1232, Jin dynasty soldiers deployed simple, early rockets — fire arrows propelled with gunpowder — to defend themselves against Mongol invaders. To launch the arrows, soldiers used a tube capped on one end and filled with gunpowder, then attached to a stick for stability — basically a large bottle rocket. Once the tube was ignited, the fire, smoke, and gas that escaped out the open end propelled the tube and the stick toward a target.

Soon after finding themselves on the receiving end of fire arrows, the Mongols started developing rockets of their own. The idea soon spread to Europe, and with a growing number of inventors experimenting with rocketry, the technology continued to develop.

Though the Chinese fire arrows are often cited as the first example of rocketry, some earlier inventions used the same basic principle. In ancient Greece, one inventor launched a wooden pigeon using steam as a propellant. Throughout the next several centuries, similar experiments followed, including in China, where chemists developed firecrackers and other fireworks.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

One of the fathers of aeronautics was a self-taught schoolteacher.

Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born in poverty in 1857 and lost most of his hearing to scarlet fever at age 9 or 10. He was then removed from school at age 14 — hardly a recipe for becoming a pioneer of aeronautics and rocketry. Yet at age 16, Tsiolkovsky started taking full advantage of the Chertkovskaya Library in Moscow, developing a passion for both science and science fiction. A few years later, he got his teaching credential and started teaching arithmetic and geometry in a small-town school, but continued doing experiments in his spare time. He even built a centrifuge to study the effects of different levels of gravity on chickens. In 1903, he published "Exploration of the World Space with Reaction Machines" in a scientific review, widely considered the first viable proposal for exploring space via rocket, including a foundational equation that’s still named for him. Today, he is widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern aeronautics and human spaceflight.