“Surely the Sky Is Open”!
“THE desire to fly is as old as mankind,” observed historian Berthold Laufer in The Prehistory of Aviation. The annals of ancient Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian, and Oriental mythology contain numerous legends of kings, gods, and heroes who tried to harness the power of flight. In almost every case, the stories involve men imitating the winged flight of birds.
For example, the Chinese tell of the wise and daring Emperor Shun, who supposedly lived more than 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. According to legend, Shun found himself trapped atop a burning granary, clothed himself in feathers, and made his escape by flying. Another account says that he jumped off a tower and used two large reed hats to parachute safely to the ground.
Among the Greeks, there is the 3,000-year-old story of Daedalus, a great artist and inventor, who built wings made of feathers, twine, and wax so that he and his son Icarus could escape from Crete, where they were being held in exile. “Surely the sky is open, and that’s the way we’ll go,” Daedalus declared. At first, the wings worked perfectly. But Icarus, enthralled with his ability to soar through the heavens, flew higher and higher until the heat of the sun melted the wax that held his wings together. The boy plunged to his death in the sea below.
Such stories fired the imagination of inventors and philosophers who longed to achieve true flight. As early as the third century C.E., the Chinese were building and experimenting with kites, showing an understanding of certain aeronautical principles long before experimentation of this kind even began in Europe. In the 15th century, Giovanni da Fontana, a Venetian physician, experimented with simple wood-and-paper rockets that were launched by an explosion of gunpowder. In about 1420, da Fontana wrote: “I, indeed, have no doubt that it is possible to attach to a man wings which may be artificially moved, by means of which he will be able to raise himself into the air and move from place to place and climb towers and cross water.”
In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci, a painter, sculptor, and skilled mechanical engineer, sketched crude designs for helicopters and parachutes as well as for gliders with flapping wingtips. The evidence suggests that he built models of at least some of his proposed flying machines. However, none of da Vinci’s designs were really practical.
From the two centuries that followed come various accounts of the efforts of daring men who strapped artificial wings onto their bodies and tried flapping them as they leapt from hillsides and towers. These earliest ‘test pilots’ were a brave and adventuresome breed—but their efforts were completely unsuccessful.
Fire Balloons and “Inflammable Air”
In 1783 news of an astounding aeronautical breakthrough spread through Paris and the provinces of France. Two brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier, discovered that they could make small paper balloons rise swiftly and smoothly into the sky by inflating them with hot air. Their first large-scale fire balloon, as it was called, was made of paper and linen and was inflated with the foul-smelling smoke from a large fire. The unmanned balloon rose to an altitude of more than 6,000 feet [1,800 m] during its inaugural flight. On November 21, 1783, the balloon carried two passengers—dubbed aeronauts by the public—on a 25-minute ride over Paris. During that same year, another inventor, Jacques Charles, unveiled the first gas-filled balloon, which was inflated with hydrogen, or “inflammable air,” as it was then known.
As balloon technology improved, the sky began to “open” rapidly to the adventurous aeronauts. By 1784, balloons were climbing to altitudes of over 11,000 feet [3,400 m]. Just one year later, Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard successfully crossed the English Channel in a hydrogen balloon carrying the world’s first airmail letters. By 1862, aeronauts had made voyages across Europe and throughout the United States and had managed to reach altitudes of over five miles! [8 km]
But the early aeronauts were still totally at the mercy of the winds; there was no way to control the direction or speed of balloon flights. The development of gasoline- and electric-powered dirigibles in the latter half of the 19th century made aerial navigation possible to a greater degree, but the sausage-shaped lighter-than-air dirigibles traveled slowly—usually between 6 [10 km] and 20 miles [30 km] an hour. A new approach was needed if man was to “raise himself into the air and move from place to place,” as da Fontana had predicted.
[Picture on page 4]
Mythical Daedalus and Icarus
[Picture on page 4]
Leonardo da Vinci
[Credit Line]
From the book Leonardo da Vinci, 1898
[Picture on page 4]
The Montgolfier brothers designed the first passenger-carrying hot-air balloon