A History of Aeronautics | Page 5

cliff edge only to find that the possession of wings was
not enough to assure flight to a human being. The sea that to this day
bears his name witnesses that he made the attempt and perished by it.
In this is assumed the bald story, from which might grow the legend of
a wise king who ruled a peaceful people--'judged, sitting in the sun,' as
Browning has it, and fashioned for himself wings with which he flew
over the sea and where he would, until the prince, Icarus, desired to
emulate him. Icarus, fastening the wings to his shoulders with wax, was
so imprudent as to fly too near the sun, when the wax melted and he
fell, to lie mourned of water-nymphs on the shores of waters
thenceforth Icarian. Between what we have assumed to be the base of
fact, and the legend which has been invested with such poetic grace in

Greek story, there is no more than a century or so of re-telling might
give to any event among a people so simple and yet so given to
imagery.
We may set aside as pure fable the stories of the winged horse of
Perseus, and the flights of Hermes as messenger of the gods. With them
may be placed the story of Empedocles, who failed to take Etna
seriously enough, and found himself caught by an eruption while
within the crater, so that, flying to safety in some hurry, he left behind
but one sandal to attest that he had sought refuge in space--in all
probability, if he escaped at all, he flew, but not in the sense that the
aeronaut understands it. But, bearing in mind the many men who tried
to fly in historic times, the legend of Icarus and Daedalus, in spite of
the impossible form in which it is presented, may rank with the story of
the Saracen of Constantinople, or with that of Simon the Magician. A
simple folk would naturally idealise the man and magnify his exploit,
as they magnified the deeds of some strong man to make the legends of
Hercules, and there, full-grown from a mere legend, is the first record
of a pioneer of flying. Such a theory is not nearly so fantastic as that
which makes the Capnobates, on the strength of their name, the
inventors of hot-air balloons. However it may be, both in story and in
picture, Icarus and his less conspicuous father have inspired the
Caucasian mind, and the world is the richer for them.
Of the unsupported myths--unsupported, that is, by even a shadow of
probability--there is no end. Although Latin legend approaches nearer
to fact than the Greek in some cases, in others it shows a disregard for
possibilities which renders it of far less account. Thus Diodorus of
Sicily relates that one Abaris travelled round the world on an arrow of
gold, and Cassiodorus and Glycas and their like told of mechanical
birds that flew and sang and even laid eggs. More credible is the story
of Aulus Gellius, who in his Attic Nights tells how Archytas, four
centuries prior to the opening of the Christian era, made a wooden
pigeon that actually flew by means of a mechanism of balancing
weights and the breath of a mysterious spirit hidden within it. There
may yet arise one credulous enough to state that the mysterious spirit
was precursor of the internal combustion engine, but, however that may
be, the pigeon of Archytas almost certainly existed, and perhaps it
actually glided or flew for short distances--or else Aulus Gellius was an

utter liar, like Cassiodorus and his fellows. In far later times a certain
John Muller, better known as Regiomontanus, is stated to have made an
artificial eagle which accompanied Charles V. on his entry to and exit
from Nuremberg, flying above the royal procession. But, since Muller
died in 1436 and Charles was born in 1500, Muller may be ruled out
from among the pioneers of mechanical flight, and it may be concluded
that the historian of this event got slightly mixed in his dates.
Thus far, we have but indicated how one may draw from the richest
stores from which the Aryan mind draws inspiration, the Greek and
Latin mythologies and poetic adaptations of history. The existing
legends of flight, however, are not thus to be localised, for with two
possible exceptions they belong to all the world and to every
civilisation, however primitive. The two exceptions are the Aztec and
the Chinese; regarding the first of these, the Spanish conquistadores
destroyed such civilisation as existed in Tenochtitlan so thoroughly that,
if legend of flight was among the Aztec records, it went with the rest;
as to the Chinese, it is more than passing strange that they, who claim
to have known