About to rise into the air and soar there like birds, people have dreamed since ancient times. Observations of birds suggested that a person needs wings to fly. The ancient Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus tells how the first homemade flying machine was designed - wings made of feathers held together with wax. Following the mythical heroes, many daredevils developed their own wing designs. But their dreams of taking to the skies didn't come true, it ended in disaster.
The next step in the attempt to invent a working aircraft was the use of movable wings. They were set in motion by the force of their legs or arms, but they only clapped, and they were not capable of lifting the entire structure into the sky.
Leonardo da Vinci did not stand aside either. Known for the development of Leonardo aircraft with movable wings set in motion by the power of human muscles. The first aircraft, which was designed by a brilliant Italian scientist and inventor, is considered the prototype of a helicopter. Leonardo drew a diagram of a device equipped with a huge propeller made of starch-impregnated linenmaterial with a diameter of 5 meters.
As conceived by the designer, four men had to rotate special levers in a circle. Modern scientists say that in order to set this structure in motion, the strength of the muscles of four people was not enough. But if Leonardo da Vinci used a powerful spring as a trigger, his aircraft could make a short, but real flight. Da Vinci did not stop developing designs for flights on this, he designed devices that could soar with the help of wind power, and in the 1480s he drew a drawing of a device “for jumping from any height without harm to humans.” The device shown in the picture differs little from a modern parachute.
As surprising as it may sound, the first aircraft to take to the skies had no wings. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Montgolfier brothers, Frenchmen Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel, invented the bulky balloon. This aircraft, filled with warm air, could lift cargo or people. The first person to take to the skies on a hot air balloon was the compatriot of the inventors Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier. A month later, he made the first free flight in a balloon in the company of the Marquis d'Arlande. It happened in 1783.
The hot air balloon moved by the will of the wind, people thought about controlled flights. In 1784, only a year after the first flight onballoon, the famous scientist, mathematician, inventor and military engineer Jacques Meunier presented a project for an airship (translated from French, this word means "controlled"). He came up with an elongated streamlined shape of airships, a method of attaching a gondola to a balloon, a balloonet inside the shell to make up for gas leaks. And most importantly, the Meunier aircraft was equipped with a propeller, which, while rotating, was supposed to push the structure forward.
Only to embody the brilliant idea of Jacques Meunier in those days was not possible, a suitable propeller had not yet been invented.
In any case, it was thanks to the developments of scientists of past centuries and their homemade aircraft that the development of modern aviation and the emergence of fast, roomy and reliable aircraft became possible.
