Another ancient myth of flying concerns Pegasus, the winged horse. Bellerophon, a Corinthian hero, rode Pegasus and with his help killed a horrible monster called the Chimera.
Not only did men of long ago dream of flying—some of them firmly believed it could be done. Archimedes, a great Greek mathematician born in 287 B.C., was one. In the year 1250 an Englishman, Roger Bacon, had the idea that a large hollow globe of thin metal could be made which, when filled with an ethereal air or liquid fire, would float on the air like a ship on water.
Leonardo da Vinci, the great Italian artist and scientist, who lived in the fifteenth century, spent years experimenting with the idea of flying. He made a number of sketches of wings to be fitted to the arms and legs of man. His plan for a parachute was soundly worked out and his idea that the wings of a flying machine should be patterned after the wings of the bat found expression in the doped fabric covering of our early airplanes.
Aviation today is such an accepted fact that we sometimes forget how men from different parts of the world had to work, suffer hardships, face ridicule, and even give their lives that flying might become possible.
In 1678, Besnier, a French locksmith, constructed a curious flying machine consisting of two wooden bars which rested on his shoulders. At the ends of the bars he attached muslin wings, arranged to open on the down stroke and close on the up stroke. The wings were operated by moving the arms and legs. Although Besnier failed to realize that no man had sufficient muscular strength to fly as the bird flies, he did sense part of the truth—that gliding with the air currents was possible. During his experiments he is said to have jumped from a window sill, glided over the roof of a near-by cottage, and landed on a barge in the river.
In 1799 an Englishman, George Cayley, conceived the idea that a kite could be built large enough to carry him up into the air. Instead of a string to hold the kite against the wind he decided to use the weight of his own body. He built a huge kite with a sustaining surface of three hundred square feet. When he held on to it and ran against the wind, the kite did indeed lift and carry him some distance through the air. Cayley’s kite was the first glider and also the very beginning of the modern airplane.
Wonderful though it may have seemed to him, no one paid any attention to Cayley’s discovery until 1867, when F. H. Wenham, also an Englishman, came to the conclusion that if a glider were attached to a propeller driven by an engine, it would fly. Wenham was right, of course, but he left his fine logic for other men to use. He did, however, leave something else by which we may remember him. He coined the word aëroplane. He took the Greek aëro, meaning air, and joined to it the Latin planus, meaning flat. The British still use the world aëroplane, but we in America use the simpler form airplane.