The Dominion of the Air | Page 3

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The Dominion of the Air: The Story of Aerial Navigation by Rev. J. M.
Bacon

CHAPTER I.
THE DAWN OF AERONAUTICS.
"He that would learn to fly must be brought up to the constant practice
of it from his youth, trying first only to use his wings as a tame goose
will do, so by degrees learning to rise higher till he attain unto skill and
confidence."

So wrote Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, who was reckoned a man of
genius and learning in the days of the Commonwealth. But so soon as
we come to inquire into the matter we find that this good Bishop was
borrowing from the ideas of others who had gone before him; and, look
back as far as we will, mankind is discovered to have entertained
persistent and often plausible ideas of human flight. And those ideas
had in some sort of way, for good or ill, taken practical shape. Thus, as
long ago as the days when Xenophon was leading back his warriors to
the shores of the Black Sea, and ere the Gauls had first burned Rome,
there was a philosopher, Archytas, who invented a pigeon which could
fly, partly by means of mechanism, and partly also, it is said, by aid of
an aura or spirit. And here arises a question. Was this aura a gas, or did
men use it as spiritualists do today, as merely a word to conjure with?
Four centuries later, in the days of Nero, there was a man in Rome who
flew so well and high as to lose his life thereby. Here, at any rate, was
an honest man, or the story would not have ended thus; but of the
rest--and there are many who in early ages aspired to the attainment of
flight--we have no more reason to credit their claims than those of
charlatans who flourish in every age.
In medieval times we are seriously told by a saintly writer (St.
Remigius) of folks who created clouds which rose to heaven by means
of "an earthen pot in which a little imp had been enclosed." We need no
more. That was an age of flying saints, as also of flying dragons. Flying
in those days of yore may have been real enough to the multitude, but it
was at best delusion. In the good old times it did not need the genius of
a Maskelyne to do a "levitation" trick. We can picture the scene at a
"flying seance." On the one side the decidedly professional showman
possessed of sufficient low cunning; on the other the ignorant and
highly superstitious audience, eager to hear or see some new thing--the
same audience that, deceived by a simple trick of schoolboy science,
would listen to supernatural voices in their groves, or oracular
utterances in their temples, or watch the urns of Bacchus fill themselves
with wine. Surely for their eyes it would need no more than the
simplest phantasmagoria, or maybe only a little black thread, to make a
pigeon rise and fly.

It is interesting to note, however, that in the case last cited there is
unquestionably an allusion to some crude form of firework, and what
more likely or better calculated to impress the ignorant! Our firework
makers still manufacture a "little Devil." Pyrotechnic is as old as
history itself; we have an excellent description of a rocket in a
document at least as ancient as the ninth century. And that a species of
pyrotechny was resorted to by those who sought to imitate flight we
have proof in the following recipe for a flying body given by a Doctor,
eke a Friar, in Paris in the days of our King John:--
"Take one pound of sulphur, two pounds of willowcarbon, six pounds
of rock salt ground very fine in a marble mortar. Place, when you
please, in a covering