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The first flying man

The Story of Immortal Folk Whose Work Will Never Die

None of us can ever pay the debt we owe to those who lived before us to the men who made life easier and happier and healthier for us all. Have you ever thought, when looking through the window, that once there was not a pane of glass in the world е Then a man dug things out of the earth, mixed them, and made Glass. Who was he е

We do not know. Nor do we know the man who found fire, or the man who found iron. Here, however, we shall read of some of those immortal men and women whose work is known and will never be forgot—those who wrote books and painted pictures, who found power and made ships and railways and aeroplanes, who gave us light, who conquered plague and found out the laws of health, who gave us liberty and law and knowledge. Let us never forget the debt to them that we can never pay.

Men have always been jealous of the birds. As far as legend carries us back we trace-man′s yearning to fly.

Think what it would have meant to men to fly in the days when they had neither trains nor ships nor roads; when the seas were still unplumbed and mountain barriers raised their heads forbidding man to cross them; when a trip from London to York by coach was so alarming that before starting men made their wills and took leave of their families as solemnly as if they were going forth to war.

King David sighed for the wings of a dove. The Greeks represented one of their legendary heroes with wings of wax, which melted when he approached too near the sum

Roger Bacon, whose genius towered like a beacon-light over a dark sea of ignorance, had a flash of inspiration when he suggested that the upward way of man must be in a vessel made lighter than air by the use, in a thin metal cylinder, of either heated air or a something which seems to have been a sort of gas. But he might as well have whispered his ideas to the Moon, so far ahead of his age was he.

Then there were those who, through ages of experiment, cracked their skulls or maimed themselves by trying to match the way of a bird in the air, with the aid of flip - flap paddles or sail-like wings worked by the arms and legs. Nothing came of all the old experiments of our ancestors, except to set an example to posterity of courage and fearless endeavour. They could raise glorious cathedrals, but they could not think out the mechanism of flying. When the first flight was made, it took place at what seemed to be the predestined hour.

Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen in 1766; the first balloon was sent up in public in 1783—but not with hydrogen, which had to wait a little longer to be harnessed. It was a puff of smoke placidly rising from an evening, fire that suggested the balloon. Two French brothers, Joseph Michael and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier sons of a paper-maker near Lyons, watching the smoke rising from a fire, speculated as to whether, being lighter than air, smoke would lift a weight. They tested the question by inflating a paper bag with smoke, and the bag floated up to the ceiling. The brothers thought some special property in the smoke was responsible for the lifting power, but they could not do much because they were unable to get enough smoke into their paper bags, until a neighbour’s wife came in and suggested that they should tie a dish full of fire and smoke to the bag itself.

The brothers did so, and the bag went up and remained longer than ever in the air. Within seven years of its discovery hydrogen was suggested by Dr. Black, the father of English chemistry, as a method of causing light bladders to float in the air, and in the very year in which the Montgolfiers began their smoke experiments a man named Cavallo had sent up soap-bubbles filled with hydrogen. But the Montgolfiers went on using smoke. They made larger paper bags and raised them with little braziers attached.