It is an interesting fact, stimulating to philosophical reflection, that in the last decade more has been done toward the conquest of the air, than in the twenty centuries preceding it, though during all that period men had been dreaming, planning, and experimenting upon contrivances for flight. Moreover when success came--or such measure of success as has been won--it came by the application of an entirely novel principle hardly dreamed of before the nineteenth century.
Some of the earlier efforts to master gravity and navigate the air are worthy of brief mention if only to show how persistent were the efforts from the earliest historic ages to accomplish this end. Passing over the legends of the time of mythology we find that many-sided genius, Leonardo da Vinci, early in the sixteenth century, not content with being a painter, architect, sculptor, engineer and designer of forts, offering drawings and specifications of wings which, fitted to men, he thought would enable them to fly. The sketches are still preserved in a museum at Paris. He modelled his wings on those of a bat and worked them with ropes passing over pulleys, the aviator lying prone, face downward, and kicking with both arms and legs with the vigour of a frog. There is, unhappily, no record that the proposition ever advanced beyond the literary stage--certainly none that Da Vinci himself thus risked his life. History records no one who kicked his way aloft with the Da Vinci device. But the manuscript which the projector left shows that he recognized the modern aviator's maxim, "There's safety in altitude." He says, in somewhat confused diction:
The bird should with the aid of the wind raise itself to a great height, and this will be its safety; because although the revolutions mentioned may happen there is time for it to recover its equilibrium, provided its various parts are capable of strong resistance so that they may safely withstand the fury and impetus of the descent.
[Illustration: The Fall of the Boche.
From the painting by Lieutenant Farré.
Photo by Peter A. Juley.]
The fallacy that a man could, by the rapid flapping of wings of any sort, overcome the force of gravity persisted up to a very recent day, despite the complete mathematical demonstration by von Helmholtz in 1878 that man could not possibly by his own muscular exertions raise his own weight into the air and keep it suspended. Time after time the "flapping wings" were resorted to by ambitious aviators with results akin to those attained by Darius Green. One of the earliest was a French locksmith named Besnier, who had four collapsible planes on two rods balanced across his shoulders. These he vigorously moved up and down with his hands and feet, the planes opening like covers of a book as they came down, and closing as they came up. Besnier made no attempt to raise himself from the ground, but believed that once launched in the air from an elevation he could maintain himself, and glide gradually to earth at a considerable distance. It is said that he and one or two of his students did in a way accomplish this. Others, however, experimenting with the same method came to sorry disaster. Among these was an Italian friar whom King James IV. of Scotland had made Prior of Tongland. Equipped with a pair of large feather wings operated on the Besnier principle, he launched himself from the battlements of Stirling Castle in the presence of King James and his court. But gravity was too much for his apparatus, and turning over and over in mid-air he finally landed ingloriously on a manure heap--at that period of nascent culture a very common feature of the pleasure grounds of a palace. He had a soul above his fate however, for he ascribed his fall not to vulgar mechanical causes, but wholly to the fact that he had overlooked the proper dignity of flight by pluming his wings with the feathers of common barn-yard fowl instead of with plumes plucked from the wings of eagles!
