Egends, Failures, And The Ballon

The ancient Greeks had a story, thousands of years ago

, about a man named Daedalus and his son Icarus. They were in prison on the island of Crete, in the Mediterranean Sea near Greece. Daedalus made a pair of wings for each of them so that they could fly home to Greece. He made the wings of feathers held together with wax, and he warned Icarus not to fly too near the sun; but Icarus disobeyed him, and the sun melted the wax. The wings fell apart and Icarus fell into the sea and was drowned. Daedalus got home safely.

That was only a story, of course. A man cannot fly with wings as a bird does; he is not strong enough. For hundreds of years men tried, and some of them who jumped off the sides of mountains or high buildings were injured or killed. One of the greatest men who ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci, who lived four hundred years ago, drew plans for three flying devices: a pair of stationary wings, for gliding; a pair of flapping wings; and a sort of helicopter. He was wrong about the first two, and he had enough sense not to try them, but he turned out to be right about the helicopter. Just as men had taken the idea of wings from the birds, thousands of thinking men who had watched soap bubbles lifted and carried by the air thought of devices that finally were realized in the balloon.

The balloon became a reality a little less than three hundred years ago; its story is told in the article on ballon. But this still was not real aviation, even though balloonists were called aviators, because there was no way to make the balloon travel exactly where a man wanted it to. By the time the balloon had developed into the airship, which could be controlled, it was too late. The airplane had already outstripped it

by: David Bunch

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