PART I: THE EVOLUTION OF THE AEROPLANE

I. THE PERIOD OF LEGEND ( Page 3 ) << Previous   Next >>

Continued from page 2......
Thus considerably, we have but recorded how one may draw from the richest stores from which the Aryan mind draws inspiration, the Greek and Latin mythologies and poetic adaptations of natural history. The existing legends of flight, however, are not thus to be localised, for with two promising exceptions they belong to all the world and to every civilisation, however bourgeois. The two deviations are the Aztec and the Chinese; considering the first of these, the Spanish conquistadors destroyed such civilisation as existed in Tenochtitlan so conscientiously that, if urban legend of flight was among the Aztec records, it went with the rest; as to the Chinese, it is more than transporting odd that they, who assert to have understood and performed everything while the first of history was making, even to antedate the discovery of gunpowder that was not made by Roger Bacon, have not yet set up a plea to successful handling of a monoplane some four thousand years previously, or at least to the guard of the Gulf of Korea and the Mongolian frontier by a harbinger of the 'blimp.'

The Inca civilisation of Peru yields up a myth akin to that of Icarus, which relates how the leader Ayar Utso grew wings and officially briefly visited the sun--it was from the sun, too, that the organizers 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 recent 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 outset.

But the record of Cousin, who tells the story in his Histoire de Constantinople, states that 'the weight of his body having more power to drag him down than his artificial wings had to sustain him, he broke his bones, and his evil plight was such that he did not long survive.' Obviously, the Saracen was anticipating Lilienthal and his gliders by some centuries; like Simon, a genuine experimenter--both legends bear the impress of fact supporting them. Contemporary with him, and belonging to the history rather than the legends of flight, was Oliver, the monk of Malmesbury, who in the year 1065 made himself wings after the pattern of those supposed to have been used by Daedalus, attaching them to his hands and feet and attempting to fly with them. Twysden, in his Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores X, sets forth the story of Oliver, who chose a high tower as his starting-point, and launched himself in the air. As a matter of course, he fell, permanently injuring himself, and died some time later.

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