Marvels of Modern Science

Excerpt

FLYING MACHINES

  Early Attempts at Flight—The Dirigible—Professor Langley's
  Experiment—The Wright Brothers—Count Zeppelin—Recent Aeroplane
  Records.

It is hard to determine when men first essayed the attempt to fly. In myth, legend and tradition we find allusions to aerial flight and from the very dawn of authentic history, philosophers, poets, and writers have made allusion to the subject, showing that the idea must have early taken root in the restless human heart. Aeschylus exclaims:

    "Oh, might I sit, sublime in air
    Where watery clouds the freezing snows prepare!"

Ariosto in his "Orlando Furioso" makes an English knight, whom he names Astolpho, fly to the banks of the Nile; nowadays the authors are trying to make their heroes fly to the North Pole.

Some will have it that the ancient world had a civilization much higher than the modern and was more advanced in knowledge. It is claimed that steam engines and electricity were common in Egypt thousands of years ago and that literature, science, art, and architecture flourished as never since. Certain it is that the Pyramids were for a long time the most solid "Skyscrapers" in the world.

Perhaps, after all, our boasted progress is but a case of going back to first principles, of history, or rather tradition repeating itself. The flying machine may not be as new as we think it is. At any rate the conception of it is old enough.

In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, often called the "Father of Philosophy," maintained that the air could be navigated. He suggested a hollow globe of copper to be filled with "ethereal air or liquid fire," but he never tried to put his suggestion into practice. Father Vasson, a missionary at Canton, in a letter dated September 5, 1694, mentions a balloon that ascended on the occasion of the coronation of the Empress Fo-Kien in 1306, but he does not state where he got the information.

The balloon is the earliest form of air machine of which we have record. In 1767 a Dr. Black of Edinburgh suggested that a thin bladder could be made to ascend if filled with inflammable air, the name then given to hydrogen gas.

In 1782 Cavallo succeeded in sending up a soap bubble filled with such gas.

It was in the same year that the Montgolfier brothers of Annonay, near Lyons in France, conceived the idea of using hot air for lifting things into the air. They got this idea from watching the smoke curling up the chimney from the heat of the fire beneath.

In 1783 they constructed the first successful balloon of which we have any description. It was in the form of a round ball, 110 feet in circumference and, with the frame weighed 300 pounds. It was filled with 22,000 cubic feet of vapor. It rose to a height of 6,000 feet and proceeded almost 7,000 feet, when it gently descended. France went wild over the exhibition.

The first to risk their lives in the air were M. Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis de Arlandes, who ascended over Paris in a hot-air balloon in November, 1783....