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Ornithopter
An ornithopter (from Greek ''ornis, ornith-'' "bird" and ''pteron'' "wing") is an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings. Designers sought to imitate the flapping-wing flight of birds, bats, and insects. Though machines may differ in form, they are usually built on the same scale as flying animals. Larger, crewed ornithopters have also been built and some have been successful. Crewed ornithopters are generally either powered by engines or by the pilot. Early history Some early crewed flight attempts may have been intended to achieve flapping-wing flight, but probably only a glide was actually achieved. They include the purported flights of the 11th-century Catholic monk Eilmer of Malmesbury (recorded in the 12th century) and the 9th-century poet Abbas Ibn Firnas (recorded in the 17th century). Roger Bacon, writing in 1260, was also among the first to consider a technological means of flight. In 1485, Leonardo da Vinci began to study the flight of birds. He grasped that human ...
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Edward Purkis Frost
Edward Purkis Frost (1842 – 1922) was an English pioneer of aviation. He built ornithopters, and became president of the Aeronautical Society. E.P. Frost lived at West Wratting Hall in Cambridgeshire and became a Justice of the Peace.Kelly, Maurice. 2006. ''Steam in the Air''. Pen & Sword Books. Pages 49-55 are about Frost. Frost began studying flight in 1868 and built a large steam-powered flying machine with both fixed and flapping wings from 1870 to 1877. Frost had intended to have a 20-25 hp steam engine but the actual engine with 5 hp was not powerful enough to lift the ornithopter from the ground. The experiment cost Frost £1000. In collaboration with several colleagues he started another large similar craft in 1902 with an internal combustion engine. It lifted from the ground in 1904. A wing from this craft is displayed in London's Science Museum A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrat ...
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Alphonse Pénaud
Alphonse Pénaud (31 May 1850 – 22 October 1880), was a 19th-century French pioneer of aviation design and engineering. He was the originator of the use of twisted rubber to power model aircraft, and his 1871 model airplane, which he called the ''Planophore'', was the first aerodynamically stable flying model. He went on to design a full-sized aircraft with many advanced features, but was unable to get any support for the project, and eventually committed suicide in 1880, aged 30. Biography Pénaud was born in Paris into a naval family, his father Charles Pénaud being an admiral in the French Navy. Because of a hip disease he walked with the aid of crutches and so was unable to attend the Naval School. At 20, he began studying aviation and joined the newly-founded ''Société Aéronautique de France''. He became vice-president of the Society in 1876 and participated in the publication of the journal ''L'Aéronaute''. In 1870, Pénaud made the first of a series of succes ...
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Aircraft
An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air. It counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines. Common examples of aircraft include airplanes, helicopters, airships (including blimps), gliders, paramotors, and hot air balloons. The human activity that surrounds aircraft is called ''aviation''. The science of aviation, including designing and building aircraft, is called '' aeronautics.'' Crewed aircraft are flown by an onboard pilot, but unmanned aerial vehicles may be remotely controlled or self-controlled by onboard computers. Aircraft may be classified by different criteria, such as lift type, aircraft propulsion, usage and others. History Flying model craft and stories of manned flight go back many centuries; however, the first manned ascent — and safe descent — in modern times took place by larger hot-air ...
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Abel Hureau De Villeneuve
Abel Hureau de Villeneuve (1833 – 2 June 1898) was an aeronautical experimenter, and ran a major French aeronautical society and journal in the late nineteenth century. He was also a vegetarianism activist. Aviation research In the 1870s, Dr. Hureau de Villeneuve was the permanent secretary-general of the Aerial Navigation Society ("Société de Navigation Aérienne") and editor of its journal ''L'Aéronaute''. He worked with aeronautical experimenters Alphonse Pénaud and Étienne-Jules Marey. Hureau de Villeneuve had promoted the use of flapping wings ("ornithopters, ornithopter designs") with perhaps 300 experimental models for 25 years since the 1860s, according to Octave Chanute, who discussed an 1872 model in particular. Vegetarianism In 1880, Hureau de Villeneuve founded the Vegetarian Society of Paris () and became its president. He became a vegetarian because he suffered from rheumatism. After some years of vegetarian dieting his health completely recovered. Hureau ...
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Gustave Trouvé
Gustave Pierre Trouvé (2 January 1839 – 27 July 1902) was a French electrical engineer and inventor in the 19th century. Trouvé was born on 2 January 1839 in La Haye-Descartes (Indre-et-Loire, France) and died on 27 July 1902 in Paris. A polymath, he was highly respected for his innovative skill in miniaturization. Youth Gustave Trouvé was born into a modest family, his father, Jacques Trouvé, was a cattle dealer. In 1850, he studied to be a locksmith in Chinon College, then in 1854-55 at the École des Arts et Métiers in Angers. His studies incomplete through poor health, he left his local region for Paris where he obtained a job with a clockmaker. Paris From 1865 Trouvé set up a workshop in central Paris where he innovated and patented many widely differing applications of electricity, regularly reported on by popular science magazines of the time such as La Nature. He invented a carbon-zinc pocket-sized battery to power his miniature electric automata which soon b ...
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Flight
Flight or flying is the process by which an object moves through a space without contacting any planetary surface, either within an atmosphere (i.e. air flight or aviation) or through the vacuum of outer space (i.e. spaceflight). This can be achieved by generating lift (force), aerodynamic lift associated with gliding flight, gliding or air propulsion, propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistics, ballistic movement. Many things can fly, from Flying and gliding animals, animal aviators such as birds, bats and insects, to natural gliders/parachuters such as patagium, patagial animals, anemochorous seeds and ballistospores, to human inventions like aircraft (airplanes, helicopters, airships, balloons, etc.) and rockets which may propel spacecraft and spaceplanes. The engineering aspects of flight are the purview of aerospace engineering which is subdivided into aeronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through the atmosphere, and astronautics, the stud ...
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Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 14522 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, Drawing, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for #Journals and notes, his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance humanism, Renaissance humanist ideal, and his List of works by Leonardo da Vinci, collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary, Michelangelo. Born Legitimacy (family law), out of wedlock to a successful Civil law notary, notary and a lower-class woman in, or near, Vinci, Tuscany, Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the Italian painter and sculptor ...
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Victor Tatin
Victor Tatin (1843–1913) was a French engineer who created an early airplane, the ''Aéroplane'', in 1879. The craft was the first model airplane to take off using its own power after a run on the ground. The model had a span of and weighed . It had twin propellers and was powered by a compressed-air engine.Exhibit Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace It was flown tethered to a central pole on a circular track at the military facilities of Chalais-Meudon. Running under its own power it took off at a speed of 8 metres per second. Between 1890 and 1897 Tatin and Charles Richet experimented with a steam-powered model with a wingspan of and weighing with fore and aft propellers. They succeeded in flying this for a distance of at a speed of 18 metres per second. In 1902-3 he collaborated with Maurice Mallet on the construction of the dirigible ''Ville de Paris'' for Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and in 1905 he designed the propeller used by Traian Vuia for his experimental aircraft ...
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Pichancourt
In 1889; Pichancourt (first name is not known) developed the L'Oiseau Mechanique (Mechanical Bird Mechanical may refer to: Machine * Machine (mechanical), a system of mechanisms that shape the actuator input to achieve a specific application of output forces and movement * Mechanical calculator, a device used to perform the basic operations of ...) which aimed to imitate the motion of a bird's wings in flight. Image:pichancourt-flyingbird.jpg, Mechanical Bird 1889 References * Chanute, Octave, ''Progress in Flying Machines'', Dover, 1894 (reprinted 1998), 19th-century French inventors {{Greece-engineer-stub ...
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Pressure Measurement
Pressure measurement is the measurement of an applied force by a fluid (liquid or gas) on a surface. Pressure is typically measured in units of force per unit of surface area. Many techniques have been developed for the measurement of pressure and vacuum. Instruments used to measure and display pressure mechanically are called pressure gauges, vacuum gauges or compound gauges (vacuum & pressure). The widely used Bourdon gauge is a mechanical device, which both measures and indicates and is probably the best known type of gauge. A vacuum gauge is used to measure pressures lower than the ambient atmospheric pressure, which is set as the zero point, in negative values (for instance, −1 bar or −760  mmHg equals total vacuum). Most gauges measure pressure relative to atmospheric pressure as the zero point, so this form of reading is simply referred to as "gauge pressure". However, anything greater than total vacuum is technically a form of pressure. For very low press ...
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Gunpowder
Gunpowder, also commonly known as black powder to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder, is the earliest known chemical explosive. It consists of a mixture of sulfur, carbon (in the form of charcoal) and potassium nitrate (saltpeter). The sulfur and carbon act as fuels while the saltpeter is an oxidizer. Gunpowder has been widely used as a propellant in firearms, artillery, rocketry, and pyrotechnics, including use as a blasting agent for explosives in quarrying, mining, building pipelines and road building. Gunpowder is classified as a low explosive because of its relatively slow decomposition rate and consequently low brisance. Low explosives deflagrate (i.e., burn at subsonic speeds), whereas high explosives detonate, producing a supersonic shockwave. Ignition of gunpowder packed behind a projectile generates enough pressure to force the shot from the muzzle at high speed, but usually not enough force to rupture the gun barrel. It thus makes a good propellan ...
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Vojvodina
Vojvodina ( sr-Cyrl, Војводина}), officially the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, is an autonomous province that occupies the northernmost part of Serbia. It lies within the Pannonian Basin, bordered to the south by the national capital Belgrade and the Sava and Danube Rivers. The administrative center, Novi Sad, is the second-largest city in Serbia. The historic regions of Banat, Bačka, and Syrmia overlap the province. Modern Vojvodina is multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, with some 26 ethnic groups and six official languages. About two million people, nearly 27% of Serbia's population, live in the province. Naming ''Vojvodina'' is also the Serbian word for voivodeship, a type of duchy overseen by a voivode. The Serbian Voivodeship, a precursor to modern Vojvodina, was an Austrian province from 1849 to 1860. Its official name is the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. Its name in the province's six official languages is: * Croatian: ''Autonomna Pokrajina Vojvodina'' * ...
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