Aeronautics - Early Aeronautics

Early Aeronautics

The first mention of aeronautics in history was in the writings of ancient Egyptians who described the flight of birds. Aeronautics also finds mention in ancient China where people were flying kites thousands of years ago. The medieval Islamic scientists were not far behind, as they understood the actual mechanism of bird flight. Before scientific investigation of aeronautics started, people started thinking of ways to fly. In a Greek legend, Icarus and his father Daedalus built wings of feathers and wax and flew out of a prison. Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he fell into the sea and drowned. When people started to study scientifically how to fly, people began to understand the basics of air and aerodynamics. Ibn Firnas may have tried to fly in the 8th century in Cordoba, Al-Andalus.

Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci were some of the first modern Europeans to study aeronautics. Leonardo studied the flight of birds in developing engineering schematics for some of the earliest flying machines in the late fifteenth century. His schematics, however, such as the Ornithopter ultimately failed as practical aircraft. The flapping machines that he designed were either too small to generate sufficient lift, or too heavy for a human being to operate.

Although the ornithopter continues to be of interest to hobbyists, it was replaced by the glider in the 19th century. Sir George Cayley was one of the most important people in the history of aeronautics. Many consider him the first true scientific aerial investigator and the first person to understand the underlying principles and forces of flight. A pioneer of aeronautical engineering, he is credited as the first person to separate the forces of lift and drag which are in effect on any flight vehicle,

Francesco Lana de Terzi, a 17th century Jesuit professor of physics and mathematics from Brescia, Lombardy, has been referred to as the Father of Aeronautics. In his work Prodromo dell'Arte Maestra (1670) he proposes a lighter-than-air vessel based on logical deductions from previous work ranging from Archimedes and Euclid to his contemporaries Robert Boyle and Otto von Guericke.