???Airflight: Early Aviation Marvels
Who invented the airplane? For many people, the only name that comes to mind when asked this question is of the Wright Brothers. Their work is truly legendary but what if I told you that thousands of bones have been broken, and hundreds of people have laid down their lives, just to enable humanity — you and me, to fly.
In this article, we will go through the complete evolution of airplanes and learn how we humans satisfied our deep desire to fly.
Early Times
Kites — the first man-made aircraft!
The kite, believed to have been invented by Chinese philosophers Mozi and Lu Ban in the 5th century BCE, used readily available materials like silk fabric, high-tensile-strength silk lines, and resilient bamboo frames. Paper kites emerged around 549 CE and were used for various purposes, including measuring distances, wind testing, signaling, and military communication. These early Chinese kites were often rectangular, flat, and decorated with mythological motifs, while some were equipped with strings and whistles for musical sounds during flight.
In ancient China, man-carrying kites — a kite designed to lift a person from the ground, served dual roles in civil and military contexts and were even used as a form of punishment. For instance, the Book of Sui, dating back to 636 CE, mentions that Emperor Wenxuan of Northern Qi enforced executions by compelling prisoners to 'fly' using bamboo mats.
In one incident many prisoners were forced by the emperor to launch themselves from the 33-meter-tall Phoenix Tower using kites. Yuan Huangtou was the sole person to make it to the Purple Way, a 2.5 km distance from the tower — making him the first person to take off from a tower using a man-carrying kite and land alive.
He was later starved to death in prison. (oops!)
Copter and Lantern
Bamboo-copter is a toy helicopter rotor that flies up when its shaft is rapidly spun. This helicopter-like top originated in Jin Dynasty China around 320 CE. Although there are few accounts stating its existence from 400 BCE.
Hot-air Balloons: The Chinese have long known that hot air ascends and used this concept in creating sky lanterns, and small paper balloons with lamps inside. These lanterns are launched for joy and during festivals, with records of their use dating back to the 3rd century BC in China. General Zhuge Liang is credited with their military use, employing them to intimidate and scare enemy forces.
It is called as Kongming lantern even today, for the honorific title Kongming given to General Zhuge Liang.
Trying to be a bird
Abbas ibn Firnas (810–887 CE), from Spain, made a jump covering his body with vulture feathers and attaching two wings to his arms. Firnas flew some distance before landing with some injuries to his back.
Although not a very successful flight, his bold attempt got a crater on the moon, one of the bridges in Spain, and the British one-plane airline, Firnas Airways, all named after him.
In the 11th century CE, a man named Jauhari tried to fly using a contraption from the roof of a mosque in Nishapur, Iran but tragically fell to his death. A few years later, Eilmer of Malmesbury built a wooden glider and, from a bell tower, glided a distance of 200 meters.
In the late 12th century CE, at the Hippodrome of Constantinople, attempted to fly by jumping off one of the central pillars with a winged device but met a similar tragic fate, falling to their death.
Modern Times
Understanding the theory first!
Soon humans realized that “trying to be a bird” was not a great idea. Spending a good number of hours learning the science and reason behind why and how things fly would be a better way to go forward, instead.
In 1485, Leonardo da Vinci started studying how birds fly. He realized that people are too heavy and not strong enough to fly with wings attached to their arms. He wrote about and sketched many designs for flying machines and mechanisms, fixed-wing gliders, parachutes, and man-powered rotorcraft and ornithopters.
(Ornithopter is an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings.)
In 1488, Leonardo sketched a hang glider design where the inner parts of the wings are fixed, and there are control surfaces towards the tips, mimicking the gliding flight of birds. This design, unlike most of his other designs, was deemed flight-worthy in principle, but he himself never flew in such a craft.
Leonardo's work remained unknown until 1797, and so had no influence on developments over the next three hundred years.
In 1643, Torricelli's invention of the barometer, which measures atmospheric pressure, led to advancements in meteorology and the understanding of air pressure. This, in turn, indirectly contributed to the scientific knowledge that would later play a role in the development of aviation, particularly in understanding the properties of air and its effects on flight.
In 1670, Francesco Lana de Terzi, an Italian Jesuit priest and scientist wrote a treatise titled "Prodromo," in which he described a design for an airship. In his design, there was a main mast with a sail, along with four additional masts that had lightweight copper foil spheres affixed to them. By removing the air from these spheres, creating a vacuum inside, they would become lighter than the air around them, generating lift. While his idea was visionary, it was never built or realized in practice.
Isaac Newton arrives!
In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, often referred to as simply the Principia, the basis of classical physics. In Book 2, he presented the theoretical derivation of the essence of the drag equation. The different sections of Book 2 largely dealt with motion through resisting mediums.
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Here, Newton compared the resistance offered by a medium against the motions of globes with different properties (material, weight, size). He also derived rules to determine the speed of waves in fluids and related them to density and condensation.
Let’s go Ballooning!
In 1709, Portuguese Father Bartolomeu de Gusm?o showed King John V of Portugal a working model of a hot-air balloon made from paper with a fire hanging underneath it. The people in the room got concerned that it might burn the curtains, so they quickly brought it down. It is the first known demonstration of a practical lighter-than-air craft.
Montgolfier Brothers
The French brothers Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-étienne Montgolfier developed a hot-air balloon in France, and demonstrated it publicly on June 4, 1783, making an unmanned flight lasting 10 minutes.
Encouraged by the success of the first flight, on 19 September 1783, the Montgolfier brothers flew the Aérostat Réveillon with the first living beings in a basket attached to the balloon: a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The sheep was believed to approximate human physiology(!) and the rooster was included as a control bird that didn’t fly at high altitudes.
Moving step by step, the next event was a tethered balloon flight. étienne Montgolfier was the first human to lift off the Earth in a balloon, making a tethered test flight on 19 October 1783.
Just a few days later, on 21 November 1783, the first free flight by humans was made by Pilatre de Rozier, together with an army officer, the Marquis d'Arlandes. They flew approximately 910 meters over Paris, covering a distance of nine kilometers. Even after landing enough fuel remained on board at the end of the flight to have allowed the balloon to fly four to five times as far.
Hydrogen Balloon
Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers flew the world's first hydrogen balloon on 27 August 1783, in Paris. The balloon was a 35-cubic-meter sphere of rubberized silk and was only capable of lifting about 9 kg. The balloon flew for 45 minutes and landed 21 kilometers away in the village of Gonesse, it was destroyed by terrified local peasants with forks and knives.
Just a few days later, on December 1, 1783, Charles and the Robert brothers conducted the launch of a new, manned hydrogen balloon in Paris. Jacques Charles served as the pilot alongside Nicolas-Louis Robert as the co-pilot of the 380-cubic-meter hydrogen-filled balloon.
The balloon's envelope had a hydrogen release valve and was draped with a net that held the basket beneath it. (Check the image below). They rose to an altitude of approximately 550 meters and, after a 125-minute journey, touched down in Nesles-la-Vallée at sunset, having covered a distance of 36 kilometers.
All these developments led to an increase in the popularity of balloon flights. It became a popular sport in the 19th century and also increased the man’s understanding of flight.
Airships — control and power
Airships are balloons that are capable of being steered, guided, or directed. These were the first powered and controlled aircraft. The first powered, controlled, sustained lighter-than-air flight is believed to have taken place in 1852 when Henri Giffard flew 24 km in France, with a steam engine-driven craft.
The Giffard airship had a stretched-out envelope filled with hydrogen, narrowing to a point at both ends. Hanging from this was a lengthy structure with a triangular rudder resembling a sail at the rear, and beneath it, there was a platform for the pilot and a steam engine. The engine, however, was not sufficiently powerful to allow Giffard to fly against the wind to make a return journey. Because of this, the pilot was not able to reach back to the starting point.
The limitation of the above was solved by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs, with their La France (airship) in 1884. It marked the first instance of a fully controllable free flight and accomplished the inaugural round trip with a landing at the departure location. During its seven journeys in 1884 and 1885, the La France airship successfully returned to its initial point of departure on five occasions.
The period from the 1880s to 1910s saw tremendous improvements in the capabilities of airships. From the ability to carry cargo to the increase in the number of passengers and faster starting procedures, all got dramatic improvements. The simultaneous development of powerful internal combustion engines also acted as a great catalyst to the development of the Airships.
Although, the airships played their roles in both the world wars, their popularity (and development) got reduced after airplanes — the heavier-than-air machines, came into the picture, about which, we will discuss in our next article.
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