A PPT material about the first attempts to fly and the history of aviation made by a student involved in the Comenius multilateral partnership “From Icarus to Interplanetary Travels”

1. The Aviation History


2. .. Chinese and Greek myths..

3. Icarus
In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the
master craftsman Daedalus. The main story
told about Icarus is his attempt to escape
from Crete by means of wings that his father
constructed from feathers and wax. He
ignored instructions not to fly too close to the
sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall
into the sea where he drowned. The myth
shares thematic similarities with that
of Phaëton — both are usually taken as tragic
examples of hubris or failed ambition — and is
often depicted in art. Today, the Hellenic Air
Force Academy is named after Icarus, who is
seen as the mythical pioneer in Greece's
attempt to conquer the skies.

4. The myth
The Lament for Icarus by H. J. Draper
 Daedalus, a talented and
remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King
Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison
the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife
and the Cretan . Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the
labyrinth because he gave Minos' daughter, Ariadne, a clew
in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the
Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
 Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings of wax and
feathers for himself and his son. Daedalus tried his wings
first, but before taking off from the island, warned his son
not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but
to follow his path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that
flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but
in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted
the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized
that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his
bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea in the area which
today bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island
southwest of Samos.

5. Although a clear understanding of bird flight
was not attained until the twentieth century,
the issue was considered settled with the
posthumous publication in 1680 of Giovanni
Alfonso Borelli’s De Motu Animalum.
Although a clear understanding of bird flight
was not attained until the twentieth century,
the issue was considered settled with the
posthumous publication in 1680 of Giovanni
Alfonso Borelli’s De Motu Animalum.
The history of flight is the history of a dream:
humankind’s dream to soar through the sky
like a bird. Birds seem to fly with so little effort
that it was only natural that early attempts to
fly would be attempts to emulate birds. Early
myths about flight and probably many early
attempts involved fashioning wings out of
birds' feathers. Since ancient times, however,
it was suspected that the mechanism of bird
flight was more complicated than it appeared
to the naked eye.
The history of flight is the history of a dream:
humankind’s dream to soar through the sky
like a bird. Birds seem to fly with so little effort
that it was only natural that early attempts to
fly would be attempts to emulate birds. Early
myths about flight and probably many early
attempts involved fashioning wings out of
birds' feathers. Since ancient times, however,
it was suspected that the mechanism of bird
flight was more complicated than it appeared
to the naked eye.

6. Nearly all ancient cultures contain myths about
flying deities. The gods of ancient Egypt,
Minoa, and Mesopotamia were often depicted
as having magnificent wings, and the Persian
god of gods, Ahura Mazda, is depicted in the
Palace of Darius I at Susa (about 490 B.c.) as
being nearly all wings. The ancient Hebrews
had traditions of placing wings on the
seraphim and on the cherubim that were on
the Ark of the Covenant, but neither they nor
the ancient Greeks and Romans saw wings as
an absolute necessity for flight. Greek gods
flew without any visible means and biblical
descriptions of angels (such as those who
visited Abraham or the one who wrestled with
Jacob) are not depicted as winged.
Nearly all ancient cultures contain myths about
flying deities. The gods of ancient Egypt,
Minoa, and Mesopotamia were often depicted
as having magnificent wings, and the Persian
god of gods, Ahura Mazda, is depicted in the
Palace of Darius I at Susa (about 490 B.c.) as
being nearly all wings. The ancient Hebrews
had traditions of placing wings on the
seraphim and on the cherubim that were on
the Ark of the Covenant, but neither they nor
the ancient Greeks and Romans saw wings as
an absolute necessity for flight. Greek gods
flew without any visible means and biblical
descriptions of angels (such as those who
visited Abraham or the one who wrestled with
Jacob) are not depicted as winged.

9. Aviation TimelineAviation Timeline
1930
1931 to 1940
1941 to 1950
1951 to 1960
1961to1970
1971 to
1980
1981 to 1990
1991 to 2000
2001-
present- to
future
1930
1931 to 1940
1941 to 1950
1951 to 1960
1961to1970
1971 to
1980
1981 to 1990
1991 to 2000
2001-
present- to
future

10. Sir George Cayley was the Yorkshire-born aristocrat who first
worked out the basic principles of the airplane in the 1790s. Oddly
enough, England was satisfied with Cayley’s theoretical
achievement and so it was slower than other European countries
in mastering the practical challenges of flight.

11. Sir George Cayley

14. Felix du Temple
1874
• Felix du Temple de la Croix (known almost universally as "Felix du Temple")
patented his design for an aerial machine in 1857. The design featured retractable
wheeled landing gear, a tractor propeller, an internal engine and a boat-shaped
hull (Mons. Du Temple had been a French Naval officer). He believed that a 6 h.p.
engine would suffice to lift the machine, which had an estimated weight of about
one ton. To pursue his design, Felix du Temple constructed numerous bird-shaped
models and deduced that a dihedral angle to the wings would assist in stability, as
well as placing most of the weight to the front of the machine. He ultimately
worked with his brother, Louis, to build a large-sized version of his design. Finding
existing steam engines to not be lightweight and powerful enough, in 1867 the
two brothers built and patented an innovative "hot air" steam engine.
• By 1874 the du Temples had constructed a large finely-built monoplane, at Brest,
France, with a wing span of some 40 feet and a weight (minus the operator) of
only about 160 pounds. At least one attempt to actually fly the machine was made
and it is generally agreed that after gaining speed down an incline, the flying
machine lifted off for a short time and then returned to the ground, with both
machine and operator uninjured.

16. Clément Ader (1841-1926)
• Self-taught French engineer and inventor, and a pioneer
• of flight before the Wright brothers.
• He was an early enthusiast of aviation who
• constructed a balloon at his own expense during the Franco-German War
of 1870-71. In 1876 he quit his job in the Administration of Bridges and
Highways to make more money to support his hobby. His early inventions
in electrical-communications included a microphone and a public-address
device.
• He then focused on the problem of heavier-than-air flying machines and
in 1890 built a steam-powered, bat-winged monoplane, which he named
the Eole. On October 9 he flew it a distance of 50 m (160 feet) on a
friend's estate near Paris. The steam engine was unsuitable for sustained
and controlled flight, which required the gasoline engine; nevertheless,
Ader's short hop was the first demonstration that a manned heavier-than-
air machine could take off from level ground under its own power.

18. Otto Lilienthal: First True Aviator
The German engineer Otto Lilienthal was the first man to
launch himself into the air, fly, and land safely. He also was
an important source of inspiration and information for the
Wright brothers in the next decade. Lilienthal was born in
Pomerania, Germany in 1848.
Even as a teenager, he was interested in flight.

20. Like several others before him, Lilienthal never
quite abandoned the idea that flapping wings
was the key to motion. In 1893 and again in
1896, he built gliders with flapping wings in the
ornithopter fashion. Each machine had a
lightweight carbonic acid engine that produced
about two horsepower (1.5 kilowatts). The
engine was supposed to make the wing tips
flap up and down and move the aircraft
forward. Neither model was successful.
On August 9, 1896, the glider he was piloting
stalled and went into a nosedive. It had
nothing to protect him, and he died the next
day of a broken spine. His last words were:
“Sacrifices must be made”.

21. Leonardo
DaVinci Inspiration for this glider may have come from the string-
controlled kite. It has been suggested that Leonardo may have built
and tested it.
 In the drawing the feet of the pilot are placed at 'm' and the
body is at 'a,b'. He has clearly thought about how the pilot controlled
the flight, using cords. But it is not clear from the drawing which is the
nose and which is the tail of the glider.
 Leonardo's design for a glider.
Original drawing by kind permission of Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.
Manuscript I, f 64r.
A glider based on this drawing was successfully flown by the
paraglider Robbie Whittall. After 40 crashes, a tail was added to make
it fly properly.
 Reminiscent of the modern hang glider, Leonardo's glider with
controls relies on pure gliding without flapping.

23. Ornithopters, Helicopters and Kites
As the dream of flight lurched toward reality during
the nineteenth century, two developments begun
centuries earlier came to a climax. One was the
failure of attempts to create an ornithopter—a flying
machine that emulated birds by having flapping
wings—and its cousin, the helicopter. The other was
the development of the kite, which had been around
in some form or other for centuries.
Front and aerial views of Jacob Degen’s flying machine as it
appeared in the early nineteenth century, but with one
important element missing: the huge balloon that actually
carried Degen aloft.

24. A large number of fanciful inventions surfaced
between the time of Leonardo and the 20th
century.
In 1754, Mikhail Lomonosov, the "Father of Russian Science,"
suggested that a coaxial rotor machine could be used to lift
meteorological instruments. He developed a small coaxial rotor
modeled after the Chinese top and the wound-up spring was
demonstrated to the Russian Academy of Sciences in July 1754.
J.P. Paucton seems to have been the first European to
propose the helicopter as a man-carrying vehicle. In
his Theorie de la vis d'Archimedes, he described a man-
powered machine called a Pterophere with two airscrews—
one to support the machine in flight and the second to
provide forward propulsion.
In 1783, the French naturalist Launoy, with the
assistance of his mechanic Bienvenu, used a version of the
Chinese top in a model consisting of two sets of rotors made
of turkey feathers that rotated in opposite directions.

25. Aviation in Romania

1.-Aurel Vlaicu
2.-Traian Vuia
3.George Valenti Bibescu

26. Aurel Vlaicu was born in the village of
Binţinţi near Geoagiu, Transylvania. He
attended Calvinist High School in Orăştie
and took his Bacalaureate in Sibiu in
1902.
He furthered his studies at Technical
University of Budapest and Technische
Hochsch München in Germany, earning
his engineer's diploma in 1907.
After working at Opel car factory
in Rüsselsheim, he returned to Binţinţi and
built a glider he flew in the summer of
1909. Later that year he moved
to Bucharest in the Kingdom of Romania,
where he began the construction of Vlaicu
I airplane that flew for the first time on
June 17, 1910 over Cotroceni airfield.

29. • George Valentin, Prince Bibescu was a Romanian early aviation pioneer.
Prince George III Valentin Bibescu , nephew of Gheorghe Bibescu, domnitor
of Wallachia, was born in Bucharest. In 1902, he married Marthe Lucie Lahovary,
who took the name Marthe Bibesco. They had one daughter, Valentina, born 27
August 1903. In 1912, he gave his wife as a present the Mogoşoaia Palace.
• Bibescu had an early interest in aviation; he flew a balloon named "Romania"
brought from France 1905. Later he tried to teach himself how to fly
a Voisin airplane, also brought from France, but without success. After Louis
Blérist's demonstrative flight in Bucharest on October 18, 1909, he went to Paris
and enrolled in Blériot's school in Pau. On January 23, 1910, he obtained the
International Pilot License number 20.

30. The hot air balloonThe hot air balloon
While some were dreaming of flying like a bird, others preferred to
take it one step at a time and simply try to lift into the air. The idea of
using Archimedes’ buoyancy principle to rise in the atmosphere by
creating an object lighter than the air it displaces had been introduced
in 1670 by a Jesuit priest, Father Francesco de Lana of Brescia, Italy.
De Lana suggested (in print) that copper could be used to create
spheres thin enough to be light- weight yet strong enough to
be evacuated of all air, thereby making the total sphere lighter than
the air the sphere displaced. The theory was sound, but producing
sufficiently light spheres that would not collapse under the pressure
of the air proved too difficult. In 1766, the British scientist Henry
Cavendish discovered hydrogen gas (as the product of mixing iron,
tin, zinc shavings, and sulfuric acid) and found it to be one-tenth the
weight of air. This should have stirred someone to realize that
hydrogen gas could be used to fill a balloon and the result would be a
lighter-than-air object. Inexplicably, it did not, and the first balloons to
fly were filled with hot air.
Barthelmy-Laurent de Gusman’s flying boat, from a
1709 engraving. The craft was to be kept aloft
by magnets in the two globes fore and aft. How this
was to be accomplished was never explained.

31. In the mid-1770s, Joseph and Etienne
Montgolfier, brothers who worked in their
father’s paper factory in Annonay in South-
Eastern France, noted that paper rose in the
updrafts of the factory’s chimney, and
occasionally a sheet would fold into a dome
and continue rising even after leaving the
immediate area of the chimney. They
conducted some simple experiments with
silk bags and soon became convinced that a
large bag with heated air inside would rise.
In actuality, this effect had already been
demonstrated nearly seventy-five years
earlier by the Brazilian priest C Bartolomeu
de Guasmao, who conducted a spectacular
demonstration in the court of King John V in
Lisbon, Portugal. But the Montgolfiers knew
nothing of this demonstration, and they
knew little about the reason their balloon
rose into the air. They believed that the
balloon was filled with a gas they called
“Montgolfier gas” that had a special
property they called “levity.” They did not
even associate heated air with Montgolfier
gas—they believed that the levity was
contained in the smoke.
In the mid-1770s, Joseph and Etienne
Montgolfier, brothers who worked in their
father’s paper factory in Annonay in South-
Eastern France, noted that paper rose in the
updrafts of the factory’s chimney, and
occasionally a sheet would fold into a dome
and continue rising even after leaving the
immediate area of the chimney. They
conducted some simple experiments with
silk bags and soon became convinced that a
large bag with heated air inside would rise.
In actuality, this effect had already been
demonstrated nearly seventy-five years
earlier by the Brazilian priest C Bartolomeu
de Guasmao, who conducted a spectacular
demonstration in the court of King John V in
Lisbon, Portugal. But the Montgolfiers knew
nothing of this demonstration, and they
knew little about the reason their balloon
rose into the air. They believed that the
balloon was filled with a gas they called
“Montgolfier gas” that had a special
property they called “levity.” They did not
even associate heated air with Montgolfier
gas—they believed that the levity was
contained in the smoke.
The superstitious peasants of the village, believing the balloon to be a
monster that was attacking them from the sky, proceeded to rip it to
shreds with scythes and pitchforks. The flight of the first “Charliere,”
as hydrogen-filled balloons were to be called for many years
afterwards, had therefore been a qualified success. The Montgolfier
brothers then built an even larger balloon-some seventy feet high—
equipped with a circular gallery for the aeronauts. Two adventurers,
Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent, Marquis
d’Arandes, volunteered for the flight, which was prepared for and
anticipated with the same nail-biting nervousness that characterized
the first manned rocket launches of modern times.
Tests were conducted with animals to determine what possible ill
effects there might be on living beings, and then, beginning on
October 15, tethered flights with humans were conducted from the
courtyard of the Palace of Versailles. On November 21, the same pair
made a free flight in their Montgolfier, landing about ten miles away
about twenty-three minutes after launching.

32. After experimenting with smaller models,
they constructed a large balloon of linen
covered with stiff paper—prints of the time
show a large blue ovoid, brightly decorated
and held together with buttons—and
conducted many trials, beginning
on April 25, 1783 (the first known date), and
culminating in a public demonstration in the
town square of Annonay on June 5. Etienne
was immediately summoned to Paris to
address the Academy of Sciences about the
brothers’ invention. Even before Etienne
arrived, the French physicist Jacques Charles,
mistakenly believing the Montgolfiers had
used hydrogen in their ascent, hastily
constructed a balloon of varnished silk, filled
it with hydrogen (an expensive chemical
procedure on such a large scale), and
launched it from the Champs de Mars, Paris,
on August 27. It rose through heavy rains that
fell that day and was carried away by the
storm to the village of Gonesse some fifteen
miles (24km) away, where it finally came to
rest.
After experimenting with smaller models,
they constructed a large balloon of linen
covered with stiff paper—prints of the time
show a large blue ovoid, brightly decorated
and held together with buttons—and
conducted many trials, beginning
on April 25, 1783 (the first known date), and
culminating in a public demonstration in the
town square of Annonay on June 5. Etienne
was immediately summoned to Paris to
address the Academy of Sciences about the
brothers’ invention. Even before Etienne
arrived, the French physicist Jacques Charles,
mistakenly believing the Montgolfiers had
used hydrogen in their ascent, hastily
constructed a balloon of varnished silk, filled
it with hydrogen (an expensive chemical
procedure on such a large scale), and
launched it from the Champs de Mars, Paris,
on August 27. It rose through heavy rains that
fell that day and was carried away by the
storm to the village of Gonesse some fifteen
miles (24km) away, where it finally came to
rest.

33. And we are here in the 21th century with
new technologies … and new sciences
about space ships, robots and alien
technologies … 
And we are here in the 21th century with
new technologies … and new sciences
about space ships, robots and alien
technologies … 