Who was the first to say that continents drifted?

Francis Bacon noticed in 1620 that the outlines of the continents fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, but did not suggest a theory of why.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1780 that the crust of the Earth must be a shell that can break and shift by movements of a fluid below

The proper theory of continental drift was suggested by Alfred Wegener in the early 20th century. He published a book "The origin of the continents and oceans" proposing the existence of a supercontinent he called Pangaea about 250 million years ago.

He was unable to explain a driving mechanism, which is one of the reasons why his theory was at first rejected by the scientific community.