II. EARLY EXPERIMENTS

Continued from page 17......
It does not appear that Paucton went beyond theory, nor is there in his theory any advance toward practical flight--da Vinci could have told him as much as he knew. He was followed by Meerwein, who invented an apparatus apparently something between a flapping wing machine and a glider, consisting of two wings, which were to be operated by means of a rod; the venturesome one who would fly by means of this apparatus had to lie in a horizontal position beneath the wings to work the rod.

Meerwein deserves a place of mention, however, by reason of his investigations into the amount of surface necessary to support a given weight. Taking that weight at 200 pounds--which would allow for the weight of a man and a very light apparatus--he estimated that 126 square feet would be necessary for support. His pamphlet, published at Basle in 1784, shows him to have been a painstaking student of the potentialities of flight.

Jean-Pierre Blanchard, later to acquire fame in connection with balloon flight, conceived and described a curious vehicle, of which he even announced trials as impending. His trials were postponed time after time, and it appears that he became convinced in the end of the futility of his device, being assisted to such a conclusion by Lalande, the astronomer, who repeated Borelli's statement that it was impossible for man ever to fly by his own strength.

This was in the closing days of the French monarchy, and the ascent of the Montgolfiers' first hot-air balloon in 1783--which shall be told more fully in its place--put an end to all French experiments with heavier- than-air apparatus, though in England the genius of Cayley was about to bud, and even in France there were those who understood that ballooning was not true flight.

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PART I: THE EVOLUTION OF THE AEROPLANE

II. EARLY EXPERIMENTS ( Page 18 ) <<Previous

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