Читать книгу Aviation in Peace and War - Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes - Страница 6

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The story of the growth of aviation may be likened to that of the discovery and opening up of a new continent. A myth arises, whence no one can tell, of the existence of a new land across the seas. Eventually this land is found without any realization of the importance of the discovery. Then comes the period of colonization and increasing knowledge. But the interior remains unexplored. So, in the case of aviation, man was long convinced, for no scientific reason, that flight was possible. With the first ascent by balloon came the imagined mastery of the air; later, the invention of flight that can be controlled at will. To-day we are still in the stage of colonization. The future resources of the air remain hidden from our view.

The Daedalean myth and the ancient conception of the winged angelic host show how the human mind has long been fascinated by the idea of flight, but the first design of an apparatus to lift man into the air, a parachute-like contrivance, was only reached at the end of the fifteenth century in one of Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts. About the same time lived the first of the long line of daring practical aviators, without whom success would never have been achieved, one John Damian, a physician of the Court of James IV of Scotland, who "took in hand to fly with wings, and to that effect caused make a pair of wings of feathers, which being fastened upon him, he flew off the castle wall of Stirling, but shortly he fell to the ground and brake his thigh-bone."

Nearly 250 years later the aeronaut had not made much progress, for we read of the Marquis de Bacqueville in 1742 attaching to his arms and legs planes of his own design and launching himself from his house in the attempt to fly across the Seine, into which, regrettably, he fell.

Meanwhile the seventeenth-century philosophers had been theorizing. In 1638 John Wilkins, the founder of the Royal Society, published a book entitled Daedalus, or Mechanical Motions. A few years later John Glanville wrote in Scepsis Scientifica "to them that come after us it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey," the sceptic proving a truer prophet than the enthusiast. By 1680 Giovanni Borelli had reached the conclusion, in his book De Volatu, that it was impossible that man should ever achieve flight by his own strength. Nor was he more likely to do so in the first aerial ship, designed in 1670 by Francesco Lana, which was to be buoyed up in the air by being suspended from four globes, made of thin copper sheeting, each of them about 25 feet in diameter. From these globes the air was to be exhausted, so that each, being lighter than the atmosphere, would support the weight of two or three men. A hundred years elapsed before Dr. Joseph Black of the University of Edinburgh made the first practical suggestion, that a balloon inflated with hydrogen would rise.