Early flying machines

Early flying machines include all forms of aircraft studied or constructed before the development of the modern aeroplane by 1910. The story of modern flight begins more than a century before the first successful manned aeroplane, and the earliest aircraft thousands of years before.

Primitive beginnings

Legends

Some ancient mythologies feature legends of men using flying devices. One of the earliest known is the Greek legend of Daedalus; in Ovid's version, Daedalus fastens feathers together with thread and wax to mimic the wings of a bird. Other ancient legends include the Indian Vimana flying palace or chariot, the biblical Ezekiel's Chariot, the Irish ''roth rámach'' built by blind druid Mug Ruith and Simon Magus, various stories about magic carpets, and the mythical British King Bladud, who conjured up flying wings. The Flying Throne of Kay Kāvus was a legendary eagle-propelled craft built by the mythical Shah of Persia, Kay Kāvus, used for flying him all the way to China.

Early attempts

According to Aulus Gellius, the Ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and strategist Archytas (428–347 BC) was reputed to have designed and built the first artificial, self-propelled flying device, a bird-shaped model propelled by a jet of what was probably steam, said to have actually flown some 200 metres around 400 BC. According to Gellius, this machine, which its inventor called ''The Pigeon'' (Greek: ''Περιστέρα'' "Peristera"), was suspended on a wire or pivot for its "flight" and was powered by a "concealed aura or spirit".

Eventually some tried to build flying devices, such as birdlike wings, and to fly by jumping off a tower, hill, or cliff. During this early period physical issues of lift, stability, and control were not understood, and most attempts ended in serious injury or death. In the 1st century AD, Chinese Emperor Wang Mang recruited a specialist scout to be bound with bird feathers; he is claimed to have glided about 100 meters. In 559 AD, Yuan Huangtou is said to have landed safely from an enforced tower jump.

The Andalusian scientist Abbas ibn Firnas (810–887 AD) reportedly made a jump in Córdoba, Spain, covering his body with vulture feathers and attaching two wings to his arms. Lynn Townsend White, Jr. (Spring, 1961). "Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition", ''Technology and Culture'' 2 (2), pp. 97–111 01/ref> The flight attempt was reported by the 17th-century Algerian historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari, who linked it to a 9th century poem by one of Muhammad I of Córdoba's court poets. Al-Maqqari stated that Firnas flew some distance, before landing with some injuries, attributed to his lacking a tail (as birds use to land). The historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. concluded that ibn Firnas made the first successful flight in history. Writing in the twelfth century, William of Malmesbury stated that the 11th-century Benedictine monk Eilmer of Malmesbury attached wings to his hands and feet and flew a short distance, but broke both legs while landing, also having neglected to make himself a tail.

Early kites

The kite was invented in China, possibly as far back as the 5th century BC by Mozi (also Mo Di) and Lu Ban (also Gongshu Ban). These leaf kites were constructed by stretching silk over a split bamboo framework. The earliest known Chinese kites were flat (not bowed) and often rectangular. Later, tailless kites incorporated a stabilizing bowline. Designs often emulated flying insects, birds, and other beasts, both real and mythical. Some were fitted with strings and whistles to make musical sounds while flying.

In 549 AD, a kite made of paper was used as a message for a rescue mission. Ancient and medieval Chinese sources list other uses of kites for measuring distances, testing the wind, lifting men, signalling, and communication for military operations.

After its introduction into India, the kite further evolved into the fighter kite. Traditionally these are small, unstable single line flat kites where line tension alone is used for control, and an abrasive line is used to cut down other kites.

Kites also spread throughout Polynesia, as far as New Zealand. Anthropomorphic kites made from cloth and wood were used in religious ceremonies to send prayers to the gods. By 1634, kites had reached the West, with an illustration of a diamond kite with a tail appearing in Bate's ''Mysteries of nature and art''.

Man-carrying kites

Man-carrying kites are believed to have been used extensively in ancient China, for both civil and military purposes and sometimes enforced as a punishment.Pelham, D.; ''The Penguin book of kites'', Penguin (1976) Stories of man-carrying kites also occur in Japan, following the introduction of the kite from China around the seventh century AD. It is said that at one time there was a Japanese law against man-carrying kites.

In 1282, the European explorer Marco Polo described the Chinese techniques then current and commented on the hazards and cruelty involved. To foretell whether a ship should sail, a man would be strapped to a kite having a rectangular grid framework and the subsequent flight pattern used to divine the outlook.

Rotor wings

The use of a rotor for vertical flight has existed since the 4th century AD in the form of the bamboo-copter, an ancient Chinese toy. The bamboo-copter is spun by rolling a stick attached to a rotor. The spinning creates lift, and the toy flies when released. The philosopher Ge Hong's book, the '' Baopuzi'' (Master Who Embraces Simplicity), written around 317, describes the apocryphal use of a possible rotor in aircraft: "Some have made flying cars eiche 飛車with wood from the inner part of the jujube tree, using ox-leather (straps) fastened to returning blades so as to set the machine in motion."

The similar "moulinet à noix" (rotor on a nut), as well as string-pull toys with four blades, appeared in Europe in the 14th century.

Hot air balloons

From ancient times the Chinese have understood that hot air rises and have applied the principle to a type of small hot air balloon called a sky lantern. A sky lantern consists of a paper balloon under or just inside which a small lamp is placed. Sky lanterns are traditionally launched for pleasure and during festivals. According to Joseph Needham, such lanterns were known in China from the 3rd century BC. Their military use is attributed to the general Zhuge Liang, who is said to have used them to scare the enemy troops.

There is evidence the Chinese also "solved the problem of aerial navigation" using balloons, hundreds of years before the 18th century.

The Renaissance

Eventually some investigators began to discover and define some of the basics of scientific aircraft design. Powered designs were either still driven by man-power or used a metal spring. In his 1250 book ''De mirabili potestate artis et naturae'' (Secrets of Art and Nature), the Englishman Roger Bacon predicted future designs for a balloon filled with an unspecified aether as well as a man-powered ornithopter, claiming to know someone who had invented the latter.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci studied bird flight for many years, analyzing it rationally and anticipating many principles of aerodynamics. He understood that "An object offers as much resistance to the air as the air does to the object", anticipating Isaac Newton's third law of motion (published in 1687). From the last years of the 15th century onwards, Leonardo wrote about and sketched many designs for flying machines and mechanisms, including ornithopters, fixed-wing gliders, rotorcraft and parachutes. His early designs were man-powered types including rotorcraft and ornithopters (improving on Bacon's proposal by adding a stabilizing tail). He eventually came to realise the impracticality of these and turned to controlled gliding flight, also sketching some designs powered by a spring.

In 1488, Leonardo drew a hang glider design in which the inner parts of the wings are fixed, and some control surfaces are provided towards the tips (as in the gliding flight of birds). His drawings survive and are deemed flight-worthy in principle, but he himself never flew in such a craft. In an essay titled ''Sul volo'' (''On flight''), he describes a flying machine called "the bird" which he built from starched linen, leather joints, and raw silk thongs. In the ''Codex Atlanticus'', he wrote, "Tomorrow morning, on the second day of January, 1496, I will make the thong and the attempt." Some of Leonardo's other designs, such as the four-person aerial screw, similar to a helicopter, have severe flaws. He drew and wrote about a design for an ornithopter around 1490. Leonardo's work remained unknown until 1797, and so had no influence on developments over the next three hundred years. Nor were his designs based on particularly good science.

Other attempts

In 1496, a man named Seccio broke both arms in Nuremberg while attempting flight. In 1507, John Damian strapped on wings covered with chicken feathers and jumped from the walls of Stirling Castle in Scotland, breaking his thigh; he later blamed it on not using eagle feathers.

The earliest report of an attempted jet flight dates back to the Ottoman Empire. In 1633, the aviator Lagâri Hasan Çelebi reportedly used a cone-shaped rocket to make the first attempt at a jet flight.

Francis Willughby's suggestion, published in 1676, that human legs were more comparable to birds' wings in strength than arms, had occasional influence. On 15 May 1793, the Spanish inventor Diego Marín Aguilera jumped with his glider from the highest part of the castle of Coruña del Conde, reaching a height of about 5 or 6 m, and gliding for about 360 metres. As late as 1811, Albrecht Berblinger constructed an ornithopter and jumped into the Danube at Ulm.

Lighter than air

Balloons

The modern era of lighter-than-air flight began early in the 17th century with Galileo Galilei's experiments in which he showed that air has weight. Around 1650, Cyrano de Bergerac wrote some fantasy novels in which he described the principle of ascent using a substance (dew) he supposed to be lighter than air, and descending by releasing a controlled amount of the substance. Francesco Lana de Terzi measured the pressure of air at sea level and in 1670 proposed the first scientifically credible lifting medium in the form of hollow metal spheres from which all the air had been pumped out. These would be lighter than the displaced air and able to lift an airship. His proposed methods of controlling height are still in use today: carrying ballast which may be dropped overboard to gain height, and venting the lifting containers to lose height. In practice de Terzi's spheres would have collapsed under air pressure, and further developments had to wait for more practicable lifting gases.

The first documented balloon flight in Europe was of a model made by the Brazilian-born Portuguese priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão. On 8 August 1709, in Lisbon, he made a small hot-air balloon of paper with a fire burning beneath it, lifting it about in front of king John V and the Portuguese court.

In the mid-18th century the Montgolfier brothers began experimenting with parachutes and balloons in France. Their balloons were made of paper, and early experiments using steam as the lifting gas were short-lived due to its effect on the paper as it condensed. Mistaking smoke for a kind of steam, they began filling their balloons with hot smoky air which they called "electric smoke". Despite not fully understanding the principles at work, they made some successful launches and in December 1782 flew a balloon to a height of . The French Académie des Sciences soon invited them to Paris to give a demonstration.

Meanwhile, the discovery of hydrogen led Joseph Black to propose its use as a lifting gas in about 1780, though practical demonstration awaited a gastight balloon material. On hearing of the Montgolfier Brothers' invitation, the French Academy member Jacques Charles offered a similar demonstration of a hydrogen balloon and this was accepted. Charles and two craftsmen, the Robert brothers, developed a gastight material of rubberised silk and set to work.

1783 was a watershed year for ballooning. Between 4 June and 1 December five separate French balloons achieved important aviation firsts:
*4 June: The Montgolfier brothers' unmanned hot air balloon lifted a sheep, a duck and a chicken in a basket hanging beneath at Annonay.
*27 August: Professor Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers flew an unmanned hydrogen balloon. The hydrogen gas was generated by chemical reaction during the filling process.
*19 October: The Montgolfiers launched the first manned flight, a tethered balloon with humans on board, at the '' Folie Titon'' in Paris. The aviators were the scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the manufacture manager Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, and Giroud de Villette.
*21 November: The Montgolfiers launched the first free flight balloon with human passengers. King Louis XVI had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first pilots, but Rozier, along with the Marquis François d'Arlandes, successfully petitioned for the honor. They drifted in a balloon powered by a wood fire. covered in 25 minutes.
*1 December: Jacques Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert launched a manned hydrogen balloon from the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. They ascended to a height of about and landed at sunset in Nesles-la-Vallée after a flight of 2 hours and 5 minutes, covering . After Robert alighted Charles decided to ascend alone. This time he ascended rapidly to an altitude of about , where he saw the sun again but also suffered extreme pain in his ears.

The Montgolfier designs had several shortcomings, not least the need for dry weather and a tendency for sparks from the fire to set light to the paper balloon. The manned design had a gallery around the base of the balloon rather than the hanging basket of the first, unmanned design, which brought the paper closer to the fire. On their free flight, De Rozier and d'Arlandes took buckets of water and sponges to douse these fires as they arose. On the other hand, the manned design of Charles was essentially modern. As a result of these exploits, the hot-air balloon became known as the ''Montgolfière'' type and the hydrogen balloon the ''Charlière''.

The next balloon of Charles and the Robert brothers was a Charlière that followed Jean Baptiste Meusnier's proposals for an elongated dirigible balloon, and was notable for having an outer envelope with the gas contained in a second, inner ballonet. On 19 September 1784, it completed the first flight of over , between Paris and Beuvry, despite the man-powered propulsive devices proving useless.

In January the next year Jean Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries crossed the English Channel from Dover to the Bois de Felmores in a Charlière. But a similar attempt the other way ended in tragedy. To try to provide both endurance and controllability, de Rozier developed a balloon with both hot air and hydrogen gas bags, a design which was soon named after him as the ''Rozière''. His idea was to use the hydrogen section for constant lift and to navigate vertically by heating and allowing to cool the hot air section, in order to catch the most favourable wind at whatever altitude it was blowing. The balloon envelope was made of goldbeaters skin. Shortly after the flight began, de Rozier was seen to be venting hydrogen when it was ignited by a spark and the balloon went up in flames, killing those on board. The source of the spark is not known, but suggestions include static electricity or the brazier for the hot air section.

Ballooning quickly became a major "rage" in Europe in the late 18th century, providing the first detailed understanding of the relationship between altitude and the atmosphere. By the early 1900s, ballooning was a popular sport in Britain. These privately owned balloons usually used coal gas as the lifting gas. This has about half the lifting power of hydrogen, so the balloons had to be larger; however, coal gas was far more readily available, and the local gas works sometimes provided a special lightweight formula for ballooning events.

Tethered balloons were used during the American Civil War by the Union Army Balloon Corps. In 1863, the young Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who was acting as a military observer with the Union Army of the Potomac, first flew as a balloon passenger in a balloon that had been in service with the Union army. Later that century, the British Army would make use of observation balloons during the Boer War.

Dirigibles or airships

Work on developing a dirigible (steerable) balloon, nowadays called an airship, continued sporadically throughout the 19th century. The first sustained powered, controlled flight in history is believed to have taken place on 24 September 1852 when Henri Giffard flew about in France from Paris to Trappes with the Giffard dirigible, a non-rigid airship filled with hydrogen and powered by a steam engine driving a 3-bladed propeller.

In 1863, Solomon Andrews flew his aereon design, an unpowered, controllable dirigible in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He flew a later design in 1866 around New York City and as far as Oyster Bay, New York. His technique of gliding under gravity works by changing the lift to provide propulsive force as the airship alternately rises and sinks, and so does not need a powerplant.

A further advance was made on 9 August 1884, when the first fully controllable free flight was made by Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs in a French Army electric-powered airship, '' La France''. The long, airship covered in 23 minutes with the aid of an electric motor, returning to its starting point. This was the first flight over a closed circuit.


These aircraft were not practical. Besides being generally frail and short-lived, they were non-rigid or at best semi-rigid. Consequently, it was difficult to make them large enough to carry a commercial load.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin realised that a rigid outer frame would allow a much bigger airship. He founded the Zeppelin firm, whose rigid ''Luftschiff Zeppelin 1'' (LZ 1) first flew from the Bodensee on the Swiss border on 2 July 1900. The flight lasted 18 minutes. The second and third flights, in October 1900 and on 24 October 1900 respectively, beat the speed record of the French airship La France by .

The Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont became famous by designing, building, and flying dirigibles. He built and flew the first fully practical dirigible capable of routine, controlled flight. With his dirigible No.6 he won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize on 19 October 1901 with a flight that took off from Saint-Cloud, rounded the Eiffel Tower and returned to its starting point. By this point, the airship had been established as the first practicable form of air travel.

Heavier than air

Parachutes

Da Vinci's design for a pyramid-shaped parachute remained unpublished for centuries. The first published design was the Croatian Fausto Veranzio

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