Flight | Introduction
Introduction
For birds, flight is moving through the air with wings; but for humans, flight is traveling through the air in an airplane. It is surprising that applying the dynamics of flight did not get off the ground earlier than the twentieth century, because the first human attempts to glide through the sky took place about 3,000 years ago in China using kites. It is recorded that in 196 B.C., General Han Hsin used kites to measure the distance to an enemy stronghold. Kites would later provide the key to wing performance principles used in the twentieth century airplane.
It's a bird, it's a man, it crashed …
In the eleventh century, an English inventor named Eilmer fastened wing mechanisms to his hands and feet and launched himself off a tower. Although Eilmer actually glided for a while before crashing, he broke both his legs and regretted forgetting to put a tail device on his back end. In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)—an Italian engineer, artist, inventor, theatrical designer, musician, and sculptor—drew one of the first sketches of a flying machine. His detailed drawing of a helicopter featured a wing and a horizontal propeller. Because da Vinci felt his painting should reflect light, space, and other sciences such as anatomy, he drew hundreds of sketches of nature and of inventions such as his flying machine.