The Aviation History                 

.. Chinese and Greek myths..

Icarus

In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the 

master craftsman Daedalus. The main story 

told about Icarus is his attem

pt to escape 

from Crete by means of wings that his father

 

constructed from feathers and w

ax. He 

ignored instructions not to fly

 too close to the 

sun, and the melting wax cau

sed him to fall 

into the sea where he drown

ed. The myth 

shares thematic similarities with that 

of Phaëton — both are usually taken as tra

gic 

examples of hubris or failed ambition — and is 

often depicted in art. Today, 

the Hellenic Air 

Force Academy is named after Icarus

, who is 

seen as the mythical pioneer in Greece's 

attempt to conquer the skies.

The myth

The Lament for Icarus by H. J. Draper   Daedalus, a talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan . Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos' daughter, Ariadne, a clew in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.

   Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before taking off from the island, warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea in the area which today bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.

Although a clear understanding of bird flight was not attained until the twentieth century, the issue was considered settled with the posthumous publication in 1680 of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s De Motu Animalum.

Although a clear understanding of bird flight was not attained until the twentieth century, the issue was considered settled with the posthumous publication in 1680 of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s De Motu Animalum.

The history of flight is the history of a dream: humankind’s dream to soar through the sky like a bird. Birds seem to fly with so little effort that it was only natural that early attempts to fly would be attempts to emulate birds. Early myths about flight and probably many early attempts involved fashioning wings out of birds' feathers. Since ancient times, however, it was suspected that the mechanism of bird flight was more complicated than it appeared to the naked eye.

The history of flight is the history of a dream: humankind’s dream to soar through the sky like a bird. Birds seem to fly with so little effort that it was only natural that early attempts to fly would be attempts to emulate birds. Early myths about flight and probably many early attempts involved fashioning wings out of birds' feathers. Since ancient times, however, it was suspected that the mechanism of bird flight was more complicated than it appeared to the naked eye.

Nearly all ancient cultures contain myths about flying deities. The gods of ancient Egypt, Minoa, and Mesopotamia were often depicted as having magnificent wings, and the Persian god of gods, Ahura Mazda, is depicted in the Palace of Darius I at Susa (about 490 B.c.) as being nearly all wings. The ancient Hebrews had traditions of placing wings on the seraphim and on the cherubim that were on the Ark of the Covenant, but neither they nor the ancient Greeks and Romans saw wings as an absolute necessity for flight. Greek gods flew without any visible means and biblical descriptions of angels (such as those who visited Abraham or the one who wrestled with Jacob) are not depicted as winged.

Nearly all ancient cultures contain myths about flying deities. The gods of ancient Egypt, Minoa, and Mesopotamia were often depicted as having magnificent wings, and the Persian god of gods, Ahura Mazda, is depicted in the Palace of Darius I at Susa (about 490 B.c.) as being nearly all wings. The ancient Hebrews had traditions of placing wings on the seraphim and on the cherubim that were on the Ark of the Covenant, but neither they nor the ancient Greeks and Romans saw wings as an absolute necessity for flight. Greek gods flew without any visible means and biblical descriptions of angels (such as those who visited Abraham or the one who wrestled with Jacob) are not depicted as winged.

Aviation TimelineAviation Timeline

1930 1931 to 1940  1941 to 1950 1951 to 1960  1961to1970 1971 to 1980  1981 to 1990 1991 to 2000  2001-present- to future

1930 1931 to 1940  1941 to 1950 1951 to 1960  1961to1970 1971 to 1980  1981 to 1990 1991 to 2000  2001-present- to future

Sir George Cayley was the Yorkshire-born aristocrat who first

worked out the basic principles of the airplane in the 1790s. Oddly

enough, England was satisfied with Cayley’s theoretical

achievement and so it was slower than other European countries

in mastering the practical challenges of flight.

Sir George Cayley

Felix du Temple 1874

• Felix du Temple de la Croix (known almost universally as "Felix du Temple")

patented his design for an aerial machine in 1857. The design featured retractable wheeled landing gear, a tractor propeller, an internal engine and a boat-shaped hull (Mons. Du Temple had been a French Naval officer). He believed that a 6 h.p. engine would suffice to lift the machine, which had an estimated weight of about one ton. To pursue his design, Felix du Temple constructed numerous bird-shaped models and deduced that a dihedral angle to the wings would assist in stability, as well as placing most of the weight to the front of the machine. He ultimately worked with his brother, Louis, to build a large-sized version of his design. Finding existing steam engines to not be lightweight and powerful enough, in 1867 the two brothers built and patented an innovative "hot air" steam engine.

• By 1874 the du Temples had constructed a large finely-built monoplane, at Brest, France, with a wing span of some 40 feet and a weight (minus the operator) of only about 160 pounds. At least one attempt to actually fly the machine was made and it is generally agreed that after gaining speed down an incline, the flying machine lifted off for a short time and then returned to the ground, with both machine and operator uninjured.

Clément Ader (1841-1926)

• Self-taught French engineer and inventor, and a pioneer• of flight before the Wright brothers.• He was an early enthusiast of aviation who• constructed a balloon at his own expense during the Franco-German War

of 1870-71. In 1876 he quit his job in the Administration of Bridges and Highways to make more money to support his hobby. His early inventions in electrical-communications included a microphone and a public-address device.

• He then focused on the problem of heavier-than-air flying machines and in 1890 built a steam-powered, bat-winged monoplane, which he named the Eole. On October 9 he flew it a distance of 50 m (160 feet) on a friend's estate near Paris. The steam engine was unsuitable for sustained and controlled flight, which required the gasoline engine; nevertheless, Ader's short hop was the first demonstration that a manned heavier-than-air machine could take off from level ground under its own power.

Otto Lilienthal: First True Aviator

The German engineer Otto Lilienthal was the first man to launch himself into the air, fly, and land safely. He also was an important source of inspiration and information for the Wright brothers in the next decade. Lilienthal was born in

Pomerania, Germany in 1848.

Even as a teenager, he was interested in flight.

Like several others before him, Lilienthal never

quite abandoned the idea that flapping wings

was the key to motion. In 1893 and again in

1896, he built gliders with flapping wings in the

ornithopter fashion. Each machine had a

lightweight carbonic acid engine that produced

about two horsepower (1.5 kilowatts). The

engine was supposed to make the wing tips

flap up and down and move the aircraft

forward. Neither model was successful.

On August 9, 1896, the glider he was piloting

stalled and went into a nosedive. It had

nothing to protect him, and he died the next

day of a broken spine. His last words were:

“Sacrifices must be made”.

Leonar

do

Da Vinci

Inspiration for this glider may have come from the string-controlled kite. It has been suggested that Leonardo may have built and tested it.

In the drawing the feet of the pilot are placed at 'm' and the body is at 'a,b'. He has clearly thought about how the pilot controlled the flight, using cords. But it is not clear from the drawing which is the nose and which is the tail of the glider.

Leonardo's design for a glider. Original drawing by kind permission of Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Manuscript I, f 64r. A glider based on this drawing was successfully flown by the paraglider Robbie Whittall. After 40 crashes, a tail was added to make it fly properly.

Reminiscent of the modern hang glider, Leonardo's glider with controls relies on pure gliding without flapping.

Ornithopters, Helicopters and Kites

As the dream of flight lurched toward reality during the nineteenth century, two developments begun centuries earlier came to a climax. One was the failure of attempts to create an ornithopter—a flying machine that emulated birds by having flapping wings—and its cousin, the helicopter. The other was the development of the kite, which had been around in some form or other for centuries.

Front and aerial views of Jacob Degen’s flying machine as it appeared in the early nineteenth century, but with one important element missing: the huge balloon that actually carried Degen aloft.

A large number of fanciful inventions surfaced between the time of Leonardo and the 20th century.

In 1754, Mikhail Lomonosov, the "Father of Russian Science," suggested that a coaxial rotor machine could be used to lift meteorological instruments. He developed a small coaxial rotor modeled after the Chinese top and the wound-up spring was demonstrated to the Russian Academy of Sciences in July 1754.

J.P. Paucton seems to have been the first European to propose the helicopter as a man-carrying vehicle. In his Theorie de la vis d'Archimedes, he described a man-powered machine called a Pterophere with two airscrews—one to support the machine in flight and the second to provide forward propulsion.

In 1783, the French naturalist Launoy, with the assistance of his mechanic Bienvenu, used a version of the Chinese top in a model consisting of two sets of rotors made of turkey feathers that rotated in opposite directions.

Aviation in Romania

1.-Aurel Vlaicu2.-Traian Vuia

3.George Valenti Bibescu

Aurel Vlaicu was born in the village of

Binţinţi near Geoagiu, Transylvania. He

attended Calvinist High School in Orăştie

and took his Bacalaureate in Sibiu in

1902.

He furthered his studies at Technical

University of Budapest and Technische

Hochsch München in Germany, earning

his engineer's diploma in 1907.

After working at Opel car factory

in Rüsselsheim, he returned to Binţinţi and

built a glider he flew in the summer of 1909. Later that year he moved to Bucharest in the Kingdom of Romania,

where he began the construction of Vlaicu

I airplane that flew for the first time on June 17, 1910 over Cotroceni airfield.

• George Valentin, Prince Bibescu  was a Romanian early aviation pioneer. Prince George III Valentin Bibescu , nephew of Gheorghe Bibescu, domnitor of Wallachia, was born in Bucharest. In 1902, he married Marthe Lucie Lahovary, who took the name Marthe Bibesco. They had one daughter, Valentina, born 27 August 1903. In 1912, he gave his wife as a present the Mogoşoaia Palace.

•         Bibescu had an early interest in aviation; he flew a balloon named "Romania" brought from France 1905. Later he tried to teach himself how to fly a Voisin airplane, also brought from France, but without success. After Louis Blérist's demonstrative flight in Bucharest on October 18, 1909, he went to Paris and enrolled in Blériot's school in Pau. On January 23, 1910, he obtained the International Pilot License number 20.

The hot air balloonThe hot air balloon

While some were dreaming of flying like a bird, others preferred to take it one step at a time and simply try to lift into the air. The idea of using Archimedes’ buoyancy principle to rise in the atmosphere by creating an object lighter than the air it displaces had been introduced in 1670 by a Jesuit priest, Father Francesco de Lana of Brescia, Italy. De Lana suggested (in print) that copper could be used to create spheres thin enough to be light- weight yet strong enough to be evacuated of all air, thereby making the total sphere lighter than the air the sphere displaced. The theory was sound, but producing sufficiently light spheres that would not collapse under the pressure of the air proved too difficult. In 1766, the British scientist Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen gas (as the product of mixing iron, tin, zinc shavings, and sulfuric acid) and found it to be one-tenth the weight of air. This should have stirred someone to realize that hydrogen gas could be used to fill a balloon and the result would be a lighter-than-air object. Inexplicably, it did not, and the first balloons to fly were filled with hot air.

Barthelmy-Laurent de Gusman’s flying boat, from a 1709 engraving.  The craft was to be kept aloft by magnets in the two globes fore and aft. How this was to be accomplished was never explained.

In the mid-1770s, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, brothers who worked in their father’s paper factory in Annonay in South-Eastern France, noted that paper rose in the updrafts of the factory’s chimney, and occasionally a sheet would fold into a dome and continue rising even after leaving  the immediate area of the chimney. They conducted some simple experiments with silk bags and soon became convinced that a large bag with heated air inside would rise. In actuality, this effect had already been demonstrated nearly seventy-five years earlier by the Brazilian priest C Bartolomeu de Guasmao, who conducted a spectacular demonstration in the court of King John V in Lisbon, Portugal. But the Montgolfiers knew nothing of this demonstration, and they knew little about the reason their balloon rose into the air. They believed that the balloon was filled with a gas they called “Montgolfier gas” that had a special property they called “levity.” They did not even associate heated air with Montgolfier gas—they believed that the levity was contained in the smoke. 

In the mid-1770s, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, brothers who worked in their father’s paper factory in Annonay in South-Eastern France, noted that paper rose in the updrafts of the factory’s chimney, and occasionally a sheet would fold into a dome and continue rising even after leaving  the immediate area of the chimney. They conducted some simple experiments with silk bags and soon became convinced that a large bag with heated air inside would rise. In actuality, this effect had already been demonstrated nearly seventy-five years earlier by the Brazilian priest C Bartolomeu de Guasmao, who conducted a spectacular demonstration in the court of King John V in Lisbon, Portugal. But the Montgolfiers knew nothing of this demonstration, and they knew little about the reason their balloon rose into the air. They believed that the balloon was filled with a gas they called “Montgolfier gas” that had a special property they called “levity.” They did not even associate heated air with Montgolfier gas—they believed that the levity was contained in the smoke. 

The superstitious peasants of the village, believing the balloon to be a monster that was attacking them from the sky, proceeded to rip it to shreds with scythes and pitchforks. The flight of the first “Charliere,” as hydrogen-filled balloons  were to be called for many years afterwards, had therefore been a qualified success. The Montgolfier brothers then built an even larger balloon-some seventy feet high—equipped with a circular gallery for the aeronauts. Two adventurers, Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent, Marquis d’Arandes, volunteered for the flight, which was prepared for and anticipated with the same nail-biting nervousness that characterized the first manned rocket launches of modern times.Tests were conducted with animals to determine what possible ill effects there might be on living beings, and then, beginning on October 15, tethered flights with humans were conducted from the courtyard of the Palace of Versailles. On November 21, the same pair made a free flight in their Montgolfier, landing about ten miles away about twenty-three minutes after launching. 

After experimenting with smaller models, they constructed a large balloon of linen covered with stiff paper—prints of the time show a large blue ovoid, brightly decorated and held together with buttons—and conducted many trials, beginning on April 25, 1783 (the first known date), and culminating in a public demonstration in the town square of Annonay on June 5. Etienne was immediately summoned to Paris to address the Academy of Sciences about the brothers’ invention. Even before Etienne arrived, the French physicist Jacques Charles, mistakenly believing the Montgolfiers had used hydrogen in their ascent, hastily constructed a balloon of varnished silk, filled it with hydrogen (an expensive chemical procedure on such a large scale), and launched it from the Champs de Mars, Paris, on August 27. It rose through heavy rains that fell that day and was carried away by the storm to the village of Gonesse some fifteen miles (24km) away, where it finally came to rest. 

After experimenting with smaller models, they constructed a large balloon of linen covered with stiff paper—prints of the time show a large blue ovoid, brightly decorated and held together with buttons—and conducted many trials, beginning on April 25, 1783 (the first known date), and culminating in a public demonstration in the town square of Annonay on June 5. Etienne was immediately summoned to Paris to address the Academy of Sciences about the brothers’ invention. Even before Etienne arrived, the French physicist Jacques Charles, mistakenly believing the Montgolfiers had used hydrogen in their ascent, hastily constructed a balloon of varnished silk, filled it with hydrogen (an expensive chemical procedure on such a large scale), and launched it from the Champs de Mars, Paris, on August 27. It rose through heavy rains that fell that day and was carried away by the storm to the village of Gonesse some fifteen miles (24km) away, where it finally came to rest. 

And we are here in the 21th century with new technologies … and new sciences about space ships, robots and alien technologies …  

And we are here in the 21th century with new technologies … and new sciences about space ships, robots and alien technologies …