A History of Aeronautics | Page 6

and done everything while the first of history was
shaping, even to antedating the discovery of gunpowder that was not
made by Roger Bacon, have not yet set up a claim to successful
handling of a monoplane some four thousand years ago, or at least to
the patrol of the Gulf of Korea and the Mongolian frontier by a
forerunner of the 'blimp.'
The Inca civilisation of Peru yields up a myth akin to that of Icarus,
which tells how the chieftain Ayar Utso grew wings and visited the
sun--it was from the sun, too, that the founders of the Peruvian Inca
dynasty, Manco Capac and his wife Mama Huella Capac, flew to earth
near Lake Titicaca, to make the only successful experiment in pure
tyranny that the world has ever witnessed. Teutonic legend gives forth
Wieland the Smith, who made himself a dress with wings and, clad in it,
rose and descended against the wind and in spite of it. Indian
mythology, in addition to the story of the demons and their rigid
dirigible, already quoted, gives the story of Hanouam, who fitted
himself with wings by means of which he sailed in the air and,
according to his desire, landed in the sacred Lauka. Bladud, the ninth
king of Britain, is said to have crowned his feats of wizardry by making
himself wings and attempting to fly--but the effort cost him a broken

neck. Bladud may have been as mythic as Uther, and again he may
have been a very early pioneer. The Finnish epic, 'Kalevala,' tells how
Ilmarinen the Smith 'forged an eagle of fire,' with 'boat's walls between
the wings,' after which he 'sat down on the bird's back and bones,' and
flew.
Pure myths, these, telling how the desire to fly was characteristic of
every age and every people, and how, from time to time, there arose an
experimenter bolder than his fellows, who made some attempt to
translate desire into achievement. And the spirit that animated these
pioneers, in a time when things new were accounted things accursed,
for the most part, has found expression in this present century in the
utter daring and disregard of both danger and pain that stamps the
flying man, a type of humanity differing in spirit from his earthbound
fellows as fully as the soldier differs from the priest.
Throughout mediaeval times, records attest that here and there some
man believed in and attempted flight, and at the same time it is clear
that such were regarded as in league with the powers of evil. There is
the half-legend, half-history of Simon the Magician, who, in the third
year of the reign of Nero announced that he would raise himself in the
air, in order to assert his superiority over St Paul. The legend states that
by the aid of certain demons whom he had prevailed on to assist him,
he actually lifted himself in the air-- but St Paul prayed him down again.
He slipped through the claws of the demons and fell headlong on the
Forum at Rome, breaking his neck. The 'demons' may have been some
primitive form of hot-air balloon, or a glider with which the magician
attempted to rise into the wind; more probably, however, Simon
threatened to ascend and made the attempt with apparatus as unsuitable
as Bladud's wings, paying the inevitable penalty. Another version of the
story gives St Peter instead of St Paul as the one whose prayers foiled
Simon --apart from the identity of the apostle, the two accounts are
similar, and both define the attitude of the age toward investigation and
experiment in things untried.
Another and later circumstantial story, with similar evidence of some
fact behind it, is that of the Saracen of Constantinople, who, in the
reign of the Emperor Comnenus--some little time before Norman
William made Saxon Harold swear away his crown on the bones of the
saints at Rouen--attempted to fly round the hippodrome at

Constantinople, having Comnenus among the great throng who
gathered to witness the feat. The Saracen chose for his starting-point a
tower in the midst of the hippodrome, and on the top of the tower he
stood, clad in a long white robe which was stiffened with rods so as to
spread and catch the breeze, waiting for a favourable wind to strike on
him. The wind was so long in coming that the spectators grew
impatient. 'Fly, O Saracen!' they called to him. 'Do not keep us waiting
so long while you try the wind!' Comnenus, who had present with him
the Sultan of the Turks, gave it as his opinion that the experiment was
both dangerous and vain, and, possibly in an attempt to controvert such
statement, the Saracen leaned into the wind and 'rose like a bird 'at the