Welcome to On Verticality. This blog explores the innate human need to escape the surface of the earth, and our struggles to do so throughout history. If you’re new here, a good place to start is the Theory of Verticality section or the Introduction to Verticality. If you want to receive updates on what’s new with the blog, you can use the Subscribe page to sign up. Thanks for visiting!
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Félix du Temple’s Monoplane
Pictured above is an illustration of Félix du Temple’s design for a monoplane, which he and his brother Luis built and tested in 1874. One such test saw the machine take off from a ski-jump and glide for a bit before safely landing back on the ground. This flight, though short, gave the craft a claim to the first successful powered flight in history.
Flying Machines
Throughout history, humans have been fascinated with flight, and some of our more industrious brothers and sisters have dedicated their lives to achieving it. This has led to a rich lineage of ideas for flying machines, and the illustration pictured here shows some famous examples throughout this lineage.
Sir George Cayley and the Science of Aviation
Sir George Cayley was an Englishman who is credited as the first person to understand the underlying principles of flight. He was born in Yorkshire, England in 1773, and from a young age he was fascinated with the idea of flight. Cayley was an engineer by trade, and his early engineering career involved many different fields. He shifted his focus to flight around 1850, and his scientific approach to the study of flight has led him to be called the world’s first aeronautical engineer.
Clément Ader's Éole and Avion III
This is Avion III, an 1897 aircraft designed by Clément Ader. Ader was a French inventor and engineer, who became interested in flight after working on electrical communications and gas ballooning for much of his career. This was the second flying machine he designed. It was an updated and improved version of his first design from 1890, the Ader Éole.
Henri J. Giffard's Airship and Captive Balloon
The airship pictured above was invented by Henri Giffard, which first flew in 1852 from Paris to Élancourt, a journey of 27 km (16.7 miles). I love this image because of the single, solitary figure in the foreground, staring up at the massive airship floating in the sky above. There’s something inspiring about the scale of the two human figures shown, one on the ground looking up, and the other controlling the airship as it floats by, looking down on the landscape below. I see Henri Giffard’s work as an attempt to bring these two worlds closer together.
Otto Lilienthal, The 'Flying Man'
I have yet to come across a history of flight that doesn’t include Otto Lilienthal. Known as the ‘Flying Man’, Lilienthal was a pioneer of aviation best known for his experiments with gliders and human flight. He made thousands of successful test flights throughout his career, and there are myriad photographs of him before and during these test flights. Pictured above is one such photo of him getting ready to make the leap off a hilltop.
Marques de Bacqueville's Leap of Faith
Pictured above is Marquis de Bacqueville, an eccentric French nobleman best known for his attempt at human flight in 1742. His full name was Jean-François Boyvin de Bonnetot, and he was born in Rouen in 1688. Details about his attempted flight are varied, but apparently on March 19, 1742 in Paris, de Bacqueville announced his intention to fly from one side of the river Seines to the other.
Alexandre Goupil's Sesquiplane
Alexandre Goupil was a French engineer, best known for designing and testing a flying machine in 1883. The machine was a sesquiplane, which is a plane with two sets of wings, one much smaller than the other. It was to be powered by a steam engine housed in a bulbous, streamlined body, which powered a single propeller at the front of the craft. The machine had a wingspan of 6 meters (20 feet), and had space for an operator to stand below the body.
Leonardo da Vinci and Human Flight
Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers in human history. He is most famous for his paintings, but the man was a true polymath, and he studied and thought about myriad subjects. There is an obsessive curiosity that surrounds his oeuvre, and there doesn’t seem to be a limit to what he would explore. For our purposes here, we’ll focus on his quest for human flight, which he pursued from the late 1480’s to the mid 1490’s.
Jean-Marie Le Bris' Artificial Albatross
Pictured above is a photograph of Jean-Marie Le Bris’ flying machine, called L'Albatros artificiel, which is French for Artificial Albatross. This is the first recorded photograph taken of a flying machine, and it shows Le Bris in the pilot seat of his glider, resting on a wooden cart before take off. This is the second version of his craft, called Albatross II, which was modified from the original version with refinements.
Eilmer of Malmesbury, The Flying Monk
Pictured above is Eilmer of Malmesbury, an English Benedictine monk who lived sometime in the early 11th century. He is best known for an alleged attempt at human flight, which marks one of the earliest recorded attempts of its kind. Unfortunately, the details of his life have been lost to time, except for a single passage in William of Malmesbury's book Gesta Regum Anglorum. William describes Eilmer as a bold youngster who, inspired by the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, believed he could fly by constructing a pair of wings and attaching them to his hands and feet.
Jakob Degen’s Flugmaschine
This is Jakob Degen’s design for his Flugmaschine, an ornithopter that was meant to fly with the power of human muscles. Degen was a Swiss watchmaker who became interested in human flight in the early 1800’s. He designed the first prototype of his Flugmaschine in 1807, which is pictured above. It was rather simple to operate; the pilot would stand on a rigid metal frame and move a horizontal bar up and down in order to flap the wings.
The Ancient Chullpa of Peru
Where do we go after we die? This question has been on our minds since pre-history, and we’ve come up with myriad stories and strategies to address it. Pictured above is an ancient chullpa, which is an ancient, above-ground tomb built by the Aymara people in Peru and Bolivia. The Aymara were an indigenous people who became a subject people of the Inca in the 15th and 16th century.
Bartolomeu de Gusmão's Passarola Airship
Many of the oldest ideas for flying machines imitated birds in some way. This proposal, by Brazilian-born Portugese inventor Bartolomeu de Gusmão, fits squarely into this category. His flying machine, called Passarola, translates to bird in Portugese. Gusmão was building on the ideas of Francesco Lana de Terzi, who previously drew up plans for a flying ship, complete with sails and a hull.
Francesco Lana de Terzi's Aerial Ship
Francesco Lana de Terzi is sometimes referred to as the Father of Aeronautics. He was an Italian Jesuit priest, a professor of physics and mathematics, and he was intrigued with human flight. In 1670 he published Prodromo, a book containing myriad ideas and inventions, the most famous of which was the design for a flying ship.
Vincent de Groof's Ornithopter
This is Vincent de Groof’s design for an ornithopter, built and tested in Bruges and London in the 1870’s. Details about de Groof’s life are sketchy, and newspaper articles from his day tend to contradict themselves. One consistent fact is that he was called The Flying Man. His goal was to achieve flight, and he believed it was possible for a human to fly by imitating the flight of a bird.
Besnier's Flying Apparatus
Many early attempts at flight were taken by people who had no formal background in the subject. Pictured above is Besnier, a locksmith from Sablé, France. In the 1670’s, Besnier had become obsessed with flight, and sometime around 1678 he built and tested an apparatus to mimic the beating of a bird’s wings.
The Tallest Building in The South
To hell with context. The artist behind the postcard above must have been thinking something similar when conjuring up the fantasy that was to be The tallest building in the South. I use the term artist, rather than architect or designer, because the building depicted hasn’t been designed, but rather imagined. It’s a non-functional idea for a tall building, rather than an actual building proposal.
Charles F. Ritchel's Dirigicycle
This is the cover of Harper’s Weekly from July 13th, 1878. The issue featured an etching of a man sitting on a tubular frame, suspended high in the air by what looks like an elongated bail of hay. The man pictured is Charles F. Ritchel, and he’s piloting his design for a dirigible. A dirigible is an airship capable of being steered (it comes from the Latin word dirigere, which means ‘to direct’), and the bail of hay is in fact a bag of rubberized fabric called ‘gossamer cloth’, filled with hydrogen gas.
William O. Ayres' Aerial Machine
There have been myriad ideas and inventions for flying machines over the years, and this one caught my eye for various reasons. It’s a design by William Orville Ayers from 1885, and it’s called the New Flying Machine. Ayers was a physician who was interested in the natural sciences, particularly ornithology (the study of birds). This interest in birds no doubt expanded to flight, and ultimately led to the design for a flying machine pictured above.