aeronautn.

1784 European Mag. & London Rev. Oct. 331 The intrepid Aeronaut sitting in his car.

1786 T. Baldwin Airopaidia 91 The Aironaut..wrote swiftly [in his log], ‘No more remarks, mind the ship.’

1796 Hist. View French Revol. xviii. 446 It is said also that a company of aeronauts is attached to each of the French armies.

1809 G. Cayley in Jrnl. Nat. Philos. Nov. 173 Let there be a convenient seat for the aeronaut.

1831 D. Lardner Pneumatics vii. 340 Such a valve is also necessary in order to enable the aeronaut to descend at pleasure.

1847 H. Melville Omoo xxvii. 104 Like an aeronaut's grapnel, her rusty little anchor was caught in the coral groves at the bottom of Papeetee Bay.

1908 H. G. Wells War in Air i. §3 They flew in machines heavier than air. But they smashed... The breeze upset them..a passing thought in the mind of the aeronaut upset them.

1937 Sun (Baltimore) 14 May 6/3 Navy aeronauts expressed privately the conviction that, if the rudders had been disabled, Capt. Max Pruss would have ‘nursed’ the Hindenburg toward the mast.

1997 P. Pullman Subtle Knife (1998) ii. 30 Some of them managed to stay with the damaged balloon of Lee Scoresby, the Texan aëronaut.

1790 E. Burke Refl. Revol. in France 355 Standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to admire, rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aëronauts of France [i.e. the instigators of the French Revolution] . View more context for this quotation

1797 C. Smith Elegiac Sonnets & Other Poems II. lxxvii. 18 Small, viewless Æronaut, that by the line Of Gossamer suspended, in mid air Float'st on a sun beam.

1839 C. Darwin in R. Fitzroy & C. Darwin Narr. Surv. Voy. H.M.S. Adventure & Beagle III. ix. 187 The little aeronaut as soon as it arrived on board, was very active,..sometimes letting itself fall, and then reascending the same thread.

1841 C. Dickens Old Curiosity Shop i. xxxiii. 277 The historian takes the friendly reader by the hand, and springing with him into the air..alights with him upon the pavement of Bevis Marks. The intrepid aeronauts alight before a small dark house.

1945 W. S. Graham 24 Apr. in Nightfisherman (1999) 37 The aeronauts of the mind alight on a river like the songed Yarrow or an evening kyle with a single heron.

2007 Times (Nexis) 3 Feb. 20 Every large bird I saw was a marsh harrier—triumphant, nonchalant aeronaut, once reduced in this country to a single nesting pair.