Human beings have long been fascinated by the notion of flight. One needs only to watch a bird scything through the skies to grasp the sense of liberation that such an activity must elicit. But for man to leave the Earth behind, many scientists and aviation pioneers gave up their lives. Some died attempting to soar, others passed-on before their work came to fruition. Here we honour some of their most notable achievements.
200 BC, China: The earliest known record of flight originates in China when a general flew a kite over an opposing army in order to calculate the necessary length of a tunnel that would take his men into enemy territory.
852 AD, Córdoba: Ibn Firnas jumps off the top of the Great Mosque’s Minaret wearing a rudimentary parachute and survives with minor injuries.
1496 AD, Italy: Da Vinci constructs a model but it fails to fly. That said, many of his sketches went on to inspire the modern helicopter. Genius.
1670 AD: Francesco Lana de Terzi suggests that lighter than air flight would be possible – kind of got the right idea, but his blueprints for a basic airship would have pretty much imploded. Nice effort, though.
1884 AD, France: The first fully controllable airship, La France, launches. Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs are responsible for the 8km covered in 23 minutes, but they have the earlier attempts of fellow Frenchmen, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, François Laurent d’Arlandes, who flew the same distance in an rudderless balloon built by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783.
1889 AD, Australia: Australian Lawrence Hargrave – inventor of the box-kite – constructs a rotary airplane engine, driven by compressed air. Wow.
1899 AD, Friedrichshafen: Construction of the Zeppelin begins.
1903 AD: Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution, makes great strides with ‘heavier than air’ flight. However, his two attempts at flight in 1903 fail spectacularly when his craft proves to be too fragile – it seems he overlooked the effects of ‘minimum gauge’ and simply scaled up the initial mode without bothering to increase the craft’s strength exponentially. Duh!
1903 AD: The Wright 1903 Flyer I is the first definable aeroplane to fly.
1918-1939 AD, the Golden Age: This twenty-one year stretch is often cited as the period that witnessed the greatest advancements in aviation. With wars happening all over the shop, the devastating potential for flight was realised and harnessed by power-hungry governments. Ironic it is that something so beautiful as the pursuit of flight should be used for acts of heinous violence – perhaps it is in man’s nature to overstretch his potential to deadly ends. Aluminium replaces wood; hope replaces fear. Bunkers!
1956 AD: USSR’s Aeroflot became the first airline to offer sustained jet services. After the introduction of the Boeing 707, air travel became safer, more comfortable and the best way to get from A to B. The Jet age is born.
1961 AD: Yuri Gagarin is launched into space. Things are getting serious and the USA reacts by pledging to reach the moon before the soviets. They succeed when the Apollo 11 crew touchdown eight years later. Still, the Russians got the first man and woman into space with a female pilot breaking Earth’s atmosphere in 1963. In 1974 the space race ends. Gutted.
2010 AD: With manned-space travel taking a backseat to purely scientific research missions, humanity seems to have reverted to its old ways and is utilising the power of flight for discovery over achievement. In a similar fashion to the Chinese general flying his kite over the enemy, the Stardust probe, which returned to Earth in 2006, has gleaned some interesting information. Captured in Stardust’s retractable arm was a pair of particles that could possibly be the first samples of ‘interstellar dust’ – the building blocks of Planets and Stars – ever discovered. Scientists are ‘cautiously excited by the yield of the seven-year, 4.8 billion km interplanetary voyage. The particles have been named Orion and Sirius and could unlock the secrets of our solar system’s formation. How bloody exciting, eh?
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