PART I: THE EVOLUTION OF THE AEROPLANE

II. EARLY EXPERIMENTS ( Page 13 )  <<Previous   Next >>

Continued from page 12......
The seventeenth century was not to end, however, without practical experiment of a noteworthy kind in gliding flight. Among the recruits to the ranks of pioneers was a certain Besnier, a locksmith of Sable, who somewhere between 1675 and 1680 constructed a glider of which a crude picture has come down to modern times. The apparatus, as will be seen, consisted of two rods with hinged flaps, and the original designer of the picture seems to have had but a small space in which to draw, since obviously the flaps must have been much larger than those shown.

Besnier placed the rods on his shoulders, and worked the flaps by cords attached to his hands and feet--the flaps opened as they fell, and closed as they rose, so the device as a whole must be regarded as a sort of flapping glider. Having by experiment proved his apparatus successful, Besnier promptly sold it to a travelling showman of the period, and forthwith set about constructing a second set, with which he made gliding flights of considerable height and distance.

Like Lilienthal, Besnier projected himself into space from some height, and then, according to the contemporary records, he was able to cross a river of considerable size before coming to earth. It does not appear that he had any imitators, or that any advantage whatever was taken of his experiments; the age was one in which he would be regarded rather as a freak exhibitor than as a serious student, and possibly, considering his origin and the sale of his first apparatus to such a client, he regarded the matter himself as more in the nature of an amusement than as a discovery.

Borelli, coming at the end of the century, proved to his own satisfaction and that of his fellows that flapping wing flight was an impossibility; the capabilities of the plane were as yet undreamed, and the prime mover that should make the plane available for flight was deep in the womb of time. Da Vinci's work was forgotten--flight was an impossibility, or at best such a useless show as Besnier was able to give.

The eighteenth century was almost barren of experiment. Emanuel Swedenborg, having invented a new religion, set about inventing a flying machine, and succeeded theoretically, publishing the result of his investigations as follows:--

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