Part 1 (2/2)
Classicwith his son Icarus froer of Minos, in the Isle of Crete, saved his, which he made for himself and his son, and by s, it appears, were soldered ax, and Icarus, flying too high, was struck by a ray of the sun, which melted the wax The youth fell into the sea, which from him derived its name of Icarian It is possible that this fable only sy down through ancient history, we note a certain Archytas, of Tarentum, who, in the fourth century B C, is said to have launched into the air the first ”flying stag,” and who, according to the Greek writers, ”eon of wood, which flew, but which could not raise itself again after having fallen” Its flight, it is said, ”was accomplished by means of a mechanical contrivance, by the vibrations of which it was sustained in the air”
In the year 66 AD, in the tiician--who called himself ”theat a certain height In the eyes of the early Christians this poas attributed to the devil, and St Peter, the nahimself in space It was possibly in answer to his prayers that the ht, fell upon the Forum, and broke his neck on the spot
From the summit of the tower of the hippodrome at Constantinople, a certain Saracen n of the Emperor Comnenus His experiments were conducted on the principle of the inclined plane He descended in an oblique course, using the resistance of the air as a support His robe, very long and very large, and of which the flaps were extended on an osier fra
The inclined plane probably suggested to Milton the flight of the angel Uriel, in ”Paradise Lost,” who descended in thefrom heaven to earth upon a ray of the sun, and ascended in the evening from earth to heaven by the saination, and ill not speak of Medeus the ician, of the enchantress Arriff of Zephyrus with the rosy wings, or of the diabolical inventions of the es, for er Bacon, in the thirteenth century, inaugurated a more scientific era In his ”Treaty of the Admirable Power of Art and Nature,” he puts forth the idea that it is possible ”toseated or suspended in the ht turn sos made to strike the air like those of a bird” In the sa-hteenth century, bears a certain rese the tereat namesake the Lord Chancellor, who in the seventeenth century inaugurated the era of experimental science
Jean Baptiste Dante, a ia, who lived in the latter part of the fifteenth century, constructed artificial wings, by ht raise theround into the air It is recorded that on s on the Lake Thrasyiven for the celebration of the e of Bartholomew d'Alvani, Dante, who hts were of quite another kind--offered to exhibit the wonder of his wings to the people of Perugia He ht, and flew above the square; but the iron hich hebeen bent, he fell upon the church of the Virgin, and broke his thigh
A silish Benedictine Oliver of Malifted with the power of foretelling events; but, like other similarly circumstanced, he does not seem to have beer able to divine the fate which awaited his after theto Ovid, Daedalus made use of These he attached to his arms and his feet, and, thus furnished, he threw his bore him up for little more than a distance of 120 paces He fell at the foot of the tower, broke his legs, and fro life He consoled hi that his attempt must certainly have succeeded had he only provided hi further, let us take notice that the seventeenth century is, par excellence, the century distinguished for narratives of iinary travels It was then that astronoe of observers was vastly increased, and frouish the surface of the moon and of other celestial bodies Thus a neorld, as it were, was revealed for hulobe was not, as we had supposed, the centre of the universe It was assigned its place far from that centre, and was known to be no more than a lobes The revelations of the telescope proved that those who for Quickly following these discoveries, extraordinary narratives of excursions through space began to be given to the world
Those scientific roerations, based upon the thinnest foundation of scientific facts In order, however, to describe a journey a the stars, it was necessary to invent soions In former times Lucian had been content with a shi+p which ascended to the rising moon upon a waterspout; but it was now necessary to ian to know so more of the forces of nature One of the first of these travellers in iination to the moon in enious than that of Lucian He trained a great number of the wild swans of St Helena to fly constantly upward toward a white object, and, having succeeded in thus training theht he threw himself off the Peak of Teneriffe, poised upon a piece of board, which was borne upward to the white antic swans At the end of twelve days he arrived, according to his story, at his destination A little later another writer of this peculiar kind of fiction, Wilkins, an Englishman, professed to have le Alexandre Dumas, who recently wrote a short rolish work by that author Wilkins' work is entitled, ”The Discovery of a New World” One chapter of the book bears the title, ”That 'tis possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world; and, if there be inhabitants there, to have coht reverend philosopher reasons:--
”If it be here inquired whatbeyond the sphere of the earth's our, I answer--1 'Tis not possible that a s to his own body, as angels are pictured, as Mercury and Daedalus are feigned, and as hath been attempted by divers, particularly by a Turk in Constantinople, a Busbequius relates 2 If there be such a great duck in Madagascar as Marcus Polus, the Venetian, , which can scoop up a horse and his rider, or an elephant, as our kites do aone of these to carry a le 3 Or if neither of these ill serve yet I do seriously, and upon good grounds, affir chariot, in which a ive such a h the air And this, perhaps, h to carry divers ether with food for their viaticuness of anything in this kind that can hinder its motion if the reat shi+p swile flies in the air as well as a little gnat This engine may be contrived from the saiole I conceive it were no difficult matter (if a man had leisure) to showof such an invention would be of such excellent use that it were enough, not only to e wherein he lives
For, besides the strange discoveries that it ht occasion in this other world, it would be also of inconceivable advantage for travelling, above any other conveyance that is now in use So that, notwithstanding all these seeh that thereto the moon; and how happy shall they be that are first successful in this atteates five differentin the air First, by means of phials filled with dehich would attract and cause to s of which should be kept inoff successively, would drive up the balloon by the force of projection Fourthly, by an octahedron of glass, heated by the sun, and of which the lower part should be allowed to penetrate the dense cold air, which, pressing up against the rarefied hot air, would raise the balloon Fifthly, by a car of iron and a ball ofup in the air, and which would attract and draw up the balloon The wiseacre who invented thesein the air seems, some would say, to have been more in want of very strict confinement on the earth than of the freedom of the skies
In 1670 Francis Lana constructed the flying-htness of heated air and of hydrogen gas not having yet been discovered, his only idea for lobes rise was to take all the air out of theht enough to rise, they must inevitably have collapsed under the at use of a sail to direct the balloon, as one directs a vessel, that also was a delusion; for the wholefreely thrown into the air, would infallibly follow the direction of the wind, whatever that ht be When a shi+p lies in the sea, and its sails are inflated with the wind, we must remember that there are two forces in operation--the active force of the wind and the passive force of the resistance of the water; and in working these forces the one against the other, the sailor can turn within a point of any direction he pleases But e are subjected wholly to a single force, and have no point of support by the use of which to turn that force to our own purposes, as is the case with the aeronaut, we are entirely at the -machine of Lana there was constructed by Galien (who, like the former, was an ecclesiastic) an air-boat, less chimerical in its foration, but ular Galien describes his air-boat, in 1755, in his little work entitled, ”The Art of Sailing in the Air” His project was a most extraordinary one, and its boldness is only equalled by the seriousness of the narrative According to him, the atmosphere is divided into two horizontal layers, the upper of which is hter than the lower ”But,” says Galien, ”a shi+p keeps its place in the water because it is full of air, and air is hter than water Suppose, then, that there was the saht between the upper and the lower layer of air as there is between the lower stratum and water; and suppose, also, a boat which rested upon the lower layer of air, with its bulk in the lighter upper layer--like a shi+p which has its keel in the water but its bulk in the air--the sa would happen with the air-shi+p as with the water-shi+p--it would float in the denser layer of air”
Galien adds that in the region of hail there was in the air a separation into two layers, the weights of which respectively are as 1 to 2
”Then,” says he, ”in placing an air-boat in the region of hail, with its sides rising eighty-three fathoht, one could sail perfectly”
But how to get this enorion of hail? This is awhich Galien is not clear
Fro machines, the inventor of the balloon could derive no benefit whatever; nor is his fame to be in the least diminished because many had laboured in the same field before hiend very confused, and of which there are olfier any valuable hints It appears that a certain Laurent de Guzman, a , John V, raising hiht Other versions of the story give a different date, and assign the pretended ascent to 1709 The above engraving, extracted from the ”Bibliotheque de la Rue de Richelieu,” is an exact copy of Guzman's supposed balloon
In 1678 a mechanician of Salle, in Maine, na-s, or paddles, mounted at the extremities of levers, which rested on the shoulders of the uided it, and who could move the description of the iven in the Journal de Paris by an eye-witness:
”The 'wings' are oblong frames, covered with taffeta, and attached to the ends of two rods, adjusted on the shoulders The wings work up and down Those in front are worked by the hands; those behind by the feet, which are connected with the ends of the rods by strings The ht wing descend in front, the left footdescend behind; and in like ht foot behind acted together sional action appeared very well contrived; it was the action of ; but the contrivance, like others of the sa to enable the air traveller to proceed in any other direction than that in which the wind blew him The inventor first flen from a stool, then froarret, frohbourhood, and then,of his machine, he descended slowly to the earth”
Tradition records that under Louis XIV a certain rope-dancer, named Alard, announced that on a certain day he would perfor in the air We have no description of his wings It is recorded, however, that he set out on his adventurous flight; but he had not calculated all the necessities of the case, and, falling to the ground, he was dangerously hurt
Leonardo da Vinci ht even have practiced it A statement to this effect, at least, is found in several historians We have, however, no direct proof of the fact