Marvels of Modern Science | Page 2

study of the great events making for the enlightenment, progress and elevation of the race, it shall have fulfilled its mission and serve the purpose for which it was written.


CHAPTER I
FLYING MACHINES
Early Attempts at Flight--The Dirigible--Professor Langley's Experiment--The Wright Brothers--Count Zeppelin--Recent Aeroplane Records.
It is hard to determine when men first essayed the attempt to fly. In myth, legend and tradition we find allusions to aerial flight and from the very dawn of authentic history, philosophers, poets, and writers have made allusion to the subject, showing that the idea must have early taken root in the restless human heart. Aeschylus exclaims:
"Oh, might I sit, sublime in air Where watery clouds the freezing snows prepare!"
Ariosto in his "Orlando Furioso" makes an English knight, whom he names Astolpho, fly to the banks of the Nile; nowadays the authors are trying to make their heroes fly to the North Pole.
Some will have it that the ancient world had a civilization much higher than the modern and was more advanced in knowledge. It is claimed that steam engines and electricity were common in Egypt thousands of years ago and that literature, science, art, and architecture flourished as never since. Certain it is that the Pyramids were for a long time the most solid "Skyscrapers" in the world.
Perhaps, after all, our boasted progress is but a case of going back to first principles, of history, or rather tradition repeating itself. The flying machine may not be as new as we think it is. At any rate the conception of it is old enough.
In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, often called the "Father of Philosophy," maintained that the air could be navigated. He suggested a hollow globe of copper to be filled with "ethereal air or liquid fire," but he never tried to put his suggestion into practice. Father Vasson, a missionary at Canton, in a letter dated September 5, 1694, mentions a balloon that ascended on the occasion of the coronation of the Empress Fo-Kien in 1306, but he does not state where he got the information.
The balloon is the earliest form of air machine of which we have record. In 1767 a Dr. Black of Edinburgh suggested that a thin bladder could be made to ascend if filled with inflammable air, the name then given to hydrogen gas.
In 1782 Cavallo succeeded in sending up a soap bubble filled with such gas.
It was in the same year that the Montgolfier brothers of Annonay, near Lyons in France, conceived the idea of using hot air for lifting things into the air. They got this idea from watching the smoke curling up the chimney from the heat of the fire beneath.
In 1783 they constructed the first successful balloon of which we have any description. It was in the form of a round ball, 110 feet in circumference and, with the frame weighed 300 pounds. It was filled with 22,000 cubic feet of vapor. It rose to a height of 6,000 feet and proceeded almost 7,000 feet, when it gently descended. France went wild over the exhibition.
The first to risk their lives in the air were M. Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis de Arlandes, who ascended over Paris in a hot-air balloon in November, 1783. They rose five hundred feet and traveled a distance of five miles in twenty-five minutes.
In the following December Messrs. Charles and Robert, also Frenchmen, ascended ten thousand feet and traveled twenty-seven miles in two hours.
The first balloon ascension in Great Britain was made by an experimenter named Tytler in 1784. A few months later Lunardi sailed over London.
In 1836 three Englishmen, Green, Mason and Holland, went from London to Germany, five hundred miles, in eighteen hours.
The greatest balloon exhibition up to then, indeed the greatest ever, as it has never been surpassed, was given by Glaisher and Coxwell, two Englishmen, near Wolverhampton, on September 5, 1862. They ascended to such an elevation that both lost the power of their limbs, and had not Coxwell opened the descending valve with his teeth, they would have ascended higher and probably lost their lives in the rarefied atmosphere, for there was no compressed oxygen then as now to inhale into their lungs. The last reckoning of which they were capable before Glaisher lost consciousness showed an elevation of twenty-nine thousand feet, but it is supposed that they ascended eight thousand feet higher before Coxwell was able to open the descending valve. In 1901 in the city of Berlin two Germans rose to a height of thirty-five thousand feet, but the two Englishmen of almost fifty years ago are still given credit for the highest ascent.
The largest balloon ever sent aloft was the "Giant" of M. Nadar, a Frenchman, which had a capacity of 215,000 cubic feet and required for a covering 22,000 yards of silk. It