Tech News Update

“God denied to men the faculty of flight so that they might lead a silent and tranquil life, for if they knew how to glide they would always be in perpetual danger.”

– Juan Caramuel y Lobkovitz (1606-1682)

Human history is filled with marvelous achievements. The invention of the automobile changed the landscapes of cities and the surrounding suburbs around the world; the Internet c­onnected people on a scale unimaginable before computers; and, of course, the arrival of the airplane only 100 years ago gave us the ability to cross oceans and connect the far corners of the Earth.

Before each of these innovations settled in and were taken for granted, but, their inventors struggled to get them off the ground. Early railway systems and gas-powered vehicles were bumpy, uncomfortable and inefficient. For centuries the abacus was the only tool available for making calculations. Attempts at flight, meanwhile, were the most perilous, since the point was maintaining control of a body or machine in the middle of the air, high above the ground.

The history of flight, in particular, is peppered with mishaps, failures and fatalities. In their efforts to know the mechanics of flight, would-be inventors mostly tried to mimic the anatomy of birds. 

Some of the attempts are mythical and legendary; others are right tales with real documentation. Some were simple designs destined for loud thuds; others were complicated contraptions meant for equally chaotic crashes. Now we’ll start our look at some of the well-meaning failures in man’s attempt to reach for the stars.

The Legend of King Bladud (c. 850 B.C.)

Before Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew the first heavier-than-air airplane at Kitty Hawk, N. C., in 1903, humans had been attempting flight for thousands of years. Ovid published his collection of myths, “Metamorphoses,” at the very be­ginning of the first millennium, which included the tale of Daedalus and Icarus escaping the island of Crete by way of glue and feathers. Actors at Roman feasts frequently entertained simply by jumping from tall heights with nothing but feathered arms, falling to their deaths.

The very first recorded attempt at human flight, but, goes as far back as 850 B.C. to Troja Nova, or New Troy, where the legendary King Bladud made his mark on aviation history. Although there’s small evidence supporting his existence, Bladud is still an vital mythical figure who may have had an actual historical counterpart. According to the tales, Bladud was a fantastic user of magic. He allegedly learned the cure for leprosy in the city of Bath, of which many considered him the founder.

King Bladud also practiced necromancy, or communication with the spirits of the dead. Legend says he used necromancy to build a pair of wings that attached to his arms. Bladud made an attempt to glide at the temple of Apollo while wearing the wings, but the mythical figure unfortunately didn’t get the right blueprints from the spirits: He fell to his death.

After his fall, he was apparently buried in Troja Nova and succeeded by his son, Lear, the very same king on whom Shakespeare based his tragic play, “King Lear.” Could the sensational death of his father be the real reason King Lear went mad during his ancient age, raging against the wind in the forest?

 Leonardo da Vinci’s Complex Ornithopter (c. 1505)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is well known around the world as an artist. Millions of people every year flock to the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, to get a glimpse of his painting the “Mona Lisa.” His sketch of “The Vitruvian Man” changed the way people use proportion in art. His depiction of Christ and his disciples, “The Last Supper,” even influenced the plot for the immensely well loved best-selling book by Dan Brown, “The Da Vinci Code.”

But Leonardo isn’t called the ultimate Renaissance man without reason. He didn’t just paint — he was also a sculptor, an anatomy expert and an engineer, and he managed to predict the steam engine, the tank and the submarine.

During his 30s, Leonardo also took a fantastic interest in flight, and by about 1505 had collected around 20 years of theory on flight. It is around this time that some reckon Leonardo built a complex ornithopter, a machine with flapping wings that closely mimicked the anatomy of birds.

No one really knows if Leonardo really built a model of and tested his ornithopter. Many of his designs remained on paper during his lifetime and weren’t built until much later; a working model of his primitive version of the car, for instance, wasn’t really constructed until 2004 because of a misunderstanding of the sketches. In 1550, but, one of Leonardo’s associates, Cardanus, wrote that he had tried “in vain” to get the ornithopter off of the ground, so there’s a possibility that the Renaissance man took his machine for a few disastrous spins.

Giovanni Battista Danti and Paolo Guidotti

Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t the only Renaissance man around to try his hand at flying. One of Leonardo’s contemporaries, the Italian mathematician Giovanni Battista Danti, was one of the many men throughout the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance to mistakenly interpret the anatomy of birds and take the motion of flapping wings a small too far. Like many other before and after him, Giovanni simply glued feathers to his arms and went them rapidly up and down, hoping the feathers had some physical property that aided the mechanics of flight. Unfortunately, trial flights by Lake Trasimeno only finished up in violent crashes on the roof of Saint Mary’s Church.

Another Renaissance man, Paolo Guidotti, who lived about 100 years later than Leonardo and Giovanni, just couldn’t let go of the bird’s-wing theory. Constructing wings made of whalebone (once again, covered with feathers) and curved into shape using springs, Guidotti attempted a flight that lasted about 400 yards (366 meters) before falling through a roof and breaking his thigh. Like most others from his age, he concluded that painting was a safer, much more enjoyable art than aviation.

John Williams, Archbishop of York (c. 1589)

Children often express their desire to glide from an early age. We often have fantastic dreams of floating or flying around effortlessly when we’re young, and it’s no surprise adolescents are drawn to superheroes like Superman, who can run, jump and glide quicker than a speeding bullet.

If we’re lucky enough, but, our parents let us know that really attempting to glide without an airplane or helicopter and a licensed professional behind the wheel is not a excellent thought. Unfortunately for one boy, seven-year-ancient John Williams from Conway, Wales, no one passed on this valuable information concerning the human body’s inability to glide. One day while wandering the walls of Conway, young Williams was compelled to throw himself out toward the sea, hoping the wind would carry him away. The coat he was wearing at the time was long, and he assumed it could billow out and act like a sail or wings. The boy, according to John Hacket in 1693, “suffer’d an adventitious Mischance” and fell immediately onto a rock below. The stone “caused a secret Infirmity, fitter to be understood, then further describ’d” — in other words, the fall Williams suffered castrated him. Williams’s infirmity didn’t slow him down, though, as he became Archbishop of York and lived to the age of 78.

Pierre Desforges (1770-1772)

Although the Abbé Pierre Desforges, a French clergyman born around the year 1723, surrounded himself with a bit of controversy during his lifetime — in 1758, he was imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly a year because of a treatise he wrote stating that Catholic priests and bishops should be allowed to marry — authorities mostly saw him as a harmless yet stubborn eccentric. During his time in prison, Desforges found the time to study the mating habits of swallows, and it was this endeavor that most likely led to his future obsession with the mechanics of flight.

In 1770, the Abbé constructed a pair of wings, but Desforges wasn’t confident enough to try them out himself. Instead, he attached the wings to the nearest peasant and covered him from head to toe in feathers. Leading him up to the top of a belfry, Desforges proceeded to instruct the peasant to start flapping and throw himself into the air, assuring him the wings would work. Desforges gave up after the peasant outright refused to commit suicide, and set to work on gathering funds to build a more reliable flying contraption.

After two years of hard work, Desforges eventually unveiled his flying machine, a six-foot (1.8-meter) long gondola covered by a canopy and attached with wings, the latter of which had a wingspan of nearly 20 feet (6.1 meters). The Abbé sought the help of four more peasants to carry the flying gondola up to the top of the Tour Guinette, a lookout tower near his church. This time Desforges was the one flying, as he most likely assumed that word had spread among the peasants to look out for any clergyman seeking aid near heights. In front of a large crowd, the peasants pushed Desforges over the edge, whereupon he promptly fell straight to the ground. The churchman suffered no more than a broken arm, but onlooker Baron von Grimm noted that although Desforges wouldn’t be burned as a sorcerer, “the thought of the gondola would be likely to lead him straight to the madhouse.”

 Besnier the Locksmith (1678)

Much of the history of aviation involves a long line of people who are altogether unassociated with flying but for a brief stint. One such person was Besnier, a locksmith from Sablé, France, who chose to place locks aside for a moment and try his hand at a flying machine.

Besnier had a bit more sense than the eccentric Desforges, and he understood that he didn’t quite have the right materials to build a flying machine that would let him take off from the ground. Instead, the locksmith designed an apparatus made of two wooden rods placed over the shoulders, on each of which was attached two wings. The rods, according to the illustration, were also tied to the pilot’s feet, which helped to pull the wings down alternately and flap the folded wings. Besnier never attempted to flap violently from the ground; he tested his contraption out on small distances, jumping from chairs, tables, window sills and, eventually, the tops of garrets and over rooftops. Although he became honestly skilled at floating for small distances, attempts at long distance flights only finished up in failure.

The Marquis de Bacqueville (1742)

The Marquis de Bacqueville (c. 1680-1760) appeared to have had very small experience in the way of flight, but one morning in 1742 he woke and announced his intent to glide from one side of the river Seine to the other. More specifically, the marquis plotted to launch from a point in his mansion, located in Paris on a quay near the river, glide a distance of about 500 to 600 feet (152 to 183 meters) and land in the Jardin des Tuileries, the gardens situated near the palace of the same name.

A large crowd came to witness his attempt on the plotted date in the same year. With large wings resembling paddles attached to both his hands and feet, the marquis jumped from a terrace on his mansion and proceeded to float toward the gardens. For a moment, the marquis appeared to have control, but after a small while he started to waver, and he eventually fell, slamming onto the deck of a barge and breaking his leg. Admitting defeat, the marquis gave up flying for excellent.

João Torto (June 20, 1540, 5 p.m.)

The small European country of Portugal has a long history of aviation: Attempts at flight go back as early as Medieval times, and the Portuguese Air Museum dates back as far as 1909, only six years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

One well-known attempt, but, made the incorrect kind of history, ending up in failure. 

The man who took the hit for Portuguese aviation history was João Torto. A right Renaissance man, Torto was a man of many trades: He was a nurse, a barber, a certified bleeder and healer, an astrologer and a teacher.

Unfortunately, Torto also had a huge head about his well-rounded education, and chose he wanted another title added to the list — aviator.

Using two pairs of calico cloth-covered wings attached to his arms and an eagle-shaped helmet, Torto jumped from the cathedral tower in St. Mateus square on June 20, 1540 at 5 p.m. (in front of a large crowd, of course) and fell a small distance to a nearby chapel.
Unfortunately, when he landed, his helmet slipped over his face and obscured his view. He fell to the ground, fatally wounding himself.

Portuguese Aviation History
Aviation has always had a large fan base in Portugal. In 1909, Portuguese aviation pioneers formed the Portuguese Air Club, a flying school to train those interested in piloting the skies. In 1910, the first airplane was seen flying in the country when the club invited French pilot Julien Marmet to give flight trials, and by 1912 Alberto Sanches de Castro became the first Portuguese pilot to glide an airplane in Portugal

 Philippe le Picard’s Laborer (c. 16th Century)

Because of several accounts detailing the uncertainty of attaching a pair of wings to one’s arms and falling several tales, there were many tales and moral tales describing the dangers of flight attempts before the beginning of modern aviation. One 16th-century writer named Phillippe le Picard, who went by the penname of Philippe d-Alcripe, wrote one such tale, infusing his fable with a bit of humor.

Le Picard’s moral tale involves a French laborer, known across Normandy as a fantastic swearer and drunkard. The fable says that one day, when the laborer had too much curdled milk to drink, he chose on a whim to make himself a flying apparatus and have a bit of fun. Without notifying his wife (who most likely would’ve scolded and slapped him into his senses), the worker cut a winnowing basket, used to separate corn kernels from husks, in half, fashioning them to his back. After failing to lift himself off the ground, the man got a brilliant thought: He needed to find a tail in order to look and act more like a bird.

Being a laborer, the man had a nearby shovel, which he placed between his legs and secured with his belt. Climbing to the top of a nearby pear tree, he jumped off, soared through the air for a split second and then fell headfirst to the ground, where he broke his shoulder. The shoulder never healed properly, preventing him from making any more drunken, misguided attempts.

The Moral Issue of Flight
As excited and curious as most people were about the possibility of flight before the invention of the airplane, some were downright terrified of the thought. People weren’t just worried about the potentially foolish dangers of flying — moral concerns about the potential criminal misuse of flying also frequently popped up in writing. In the 17th century, for instance, Johann Daniel Major imagines a world in which “treachery, robbery, and assassination […] would be heaped upon one another! Towns and castles, whole provinces and kingdoms, would presumably soon be obliged to fill the air either by means of the frequent firing of canon or by stirring up rising smoke […] to protect themselves […] against total invasion.” By the 18th century, as the possibility of flight was becoming more of a reality, fears in France of risky flying even led to proposed legislation that detailed strict control over the use of new flying machines.

. Al-Djawhari (c. 1000)
The first more or less reliable historical account of attempted flight happened around the year A.D. 1000 in Nisabur, Arabia. The would-be aviator in question is al-Djawhari, the fantastic Turkish scholar from Farab.

Sometime between the years 1002 and 1010 (several different accounts vary), al-Djawhari tied two pieces of wood to his arms and climbed the roof of a tall mosque in Nisabur. According to eyewitnesses, the scholar’s bold go drew a large crowd, to whom he announced:

“O People! No one has made this discovery before. Now I will glide before your very eyes. The most vital thing on Earth is to glide to the skies. That I will do now.”

That, unfortunately, he did not do. Al-Djawhari fell straight to the ground and was killed, stamping into history the first recorded attempt at human flight.

Turkish De-Flight
Sciences such as mathematics and astronomy were very vital to Islamic scholars during the Middle Ages, and flight became a sacred ideal to Turks well before it was seriously discussed in Europe. Around the 13th century, the Turkish lyric poet Sultan Veled included the word “ugmak” in his poems, which means both “heaven” and “to glide.” Experiments with gunpowder and rockets were just as revered, and, according to anecdotes, one man named Lagarî Hasan Celebi even mounted a rocket, lit it and flew over a lake before falling in unharmed