Having by his skill achieved the conquest of the waters that encompass the habitable globe, it was natural for man to desire likewise the mastery of the air in which we breathe. In all ages, therefore, great ingenuity has been expended in efforts at flying, all of which have as yet resulted in failure. But the analogy between sailing on the water and sailing in the air is not so close as many enthusiasts have supposed it to be. There is a general resemblance, inasmuch as in both cases the propulsion must be made by means of a fluid. But in the one case the fluid is inelastic, in the other elastic; and the physicist or mathematician knows how vastly different are the properties of liquids, even in fundamental points, from those of aeriform or gaseous bodies. Again, in the one case the vessel floats on the surface of the water, in the other it must float totally immersed in the aerial fluid. A ship, while sailing, is acted on by two fluids—the water supports it and the air propels it; but a ship sailing in the air would be only under the action of the one fluid that surrounds it on all sides. These few considerations—and many more might be added—indicate the essential distinctions between the two cases; and a very little thought shows that it is not so remarkable as it at first sight appears, that the invention of the art of sailing on the water should be lost in prehistoric antiquity, while that of sailing in the air is not a century old; and that while navigation is one of the most perfect of the arts, the power of directing a body floating in the air still remains unattained. Many have argued, that because navigation is an accomplished fact, therefore the navigation of the air must be possible; and without denying the truth of the conclusion, it is worth while at the outset of this article to point out the fallacy of the reasoning. It is true that there is no reason to despair of the attainment of aerial navigation, as the history of invention and science records many victories as great and at one time apparently as far off; still, it is as well to notice how little assistance the old discovery affords towards the solution of the new: it may, indeed, even be that progress has been retarded by the false analogy, for we may feel pretty certain that if ever the air is navigated, it will be by ships presenting little resemblance to those that traverse the ocean.

The subject of aerostation is scarcely ever alluded to by the classical writers, and the fable of Daedalus and Icarus, and the dove of Archytas, form almost all we have to record in relation to flying previous to the dark ages. Daedalus, an Athenian, killed his nephew Talus through jealousy of his talents, and fled with his son Icarus to Crete, where he built the celebrated labyrinth for Minos, the king. But having offended Minos, so that he was imprisoned by him, he made wings of feathers, cemented with wax, for himself and his son, so that they might escape by flight. He gave his son directions to fly neither too low nor too high, but to follow him. Icarus, however, becoming excited, forgot his father’s advice, and rose so high that the heat of the sun melted the wax of his wings, and he fell into the sea near Samos, the island of Icaria and the Icarian sea being named after him. Daedalus accomplished his flight in safety. (Ovid, Met. lib. viii. Fab. iii.) The explanation of the myth may be, as has been supposed, that Daedalus used sails, which, till then, according to Pausanius and Palaephatus, were unknown, and so was enabled to escape from Minos’ galleys, which were only provided with oars; and that Icarus was drowned near the island Icaria. But the whole story of Daedalus is so fanciful a romance, that it is scarcely worth while even to speculate upon what the infinitesimal fragment of truth that lay at the bottom of it may have been.

Archytas of Tarentum was a well-known geometer and astronomer, and he is apostrophised by Horace (Ode 28, lib. i.) The account of his flying pigeon or dove we owe to Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticoe), who says “that it was the model of a dove or a pigeon formed in wood, and so contrived as by a certain mechanical art and power to fly: so nicely was it balanced by weights, and put in motion by hidden and enclosed air.” Gellius gives as his authorities “many men of eminence among the Greeks,” whom he does not mention by name, and Favorinus the philosopher.

Archytas thus has been regarded as holding to aeronautics much about the same position as Archimedes does to the mechanical sciences; but while the claim of the latter rests on real discoveries and great contributions to knowledge, the former owes his position merely to an unsupported and untrustworthy tradition. When the fire-balloon was invented, it was only natural that many should see in the “hidden and enclosed air” of Archytas’ dove a previous discovery of the hot-air balloon. It is quite possible that Archytas may have rarefied the air in his dove by heat, and so made it ascend; but in this case it certainly could not have been made of wood. But if the dove ever was made to appear to fly, it is much the more probable that this effect was produced, as in the scenes at theatres, by means of fine strings or wires invisible to the spectators.

The ancients seem to have been convinced of the impossibility of men being able to fly, and they appear to have made no attempts in this direction at all. The power of flying was attributed only to the most powerful of the divinities; and it was regarded as only secondary to Jupiter’s prerogative of flashing the lightning and hurling the thunderbolt.

The history of aerostatics in the Middle Ages, like that of every other subject relating even remotely to science or knowledge of any kind, is little better than a record of the falsehoods or chimeras circulated by impostors or enthusiasts. Truth was completely obscured by ignorance and fanaticism, and every person of superior talents and acquirements was believed to deal in magic, and to perform his feats of skill chiefly through the secret aid granted him by the prince of darkness; and in a later and comparatively recent period, those wretched creatures whom the unfeeling credulity of our ancestors, particularly during the prevalence of religious fanaticism, stigmatised and murdered under the denomination of witches, were supposed to work all their enchantments, to change their shapes at will, and to transport themselves through the air with the swiftness of thought, by a power derived from their infernal master, to whom was thus assigned the privilege of conferring the gift of aerial navigation upon his servants.

During the darkness of the Middle Ages every one at all distinguished for his knowledge in physics was generally reputed to have obtained the power of flying in the air. Friar Bacon did not scruple to claim the invention; and the credulity and indulgent admiration of some authors have lent to these pretensions more credit than they really deserved. Any one who takes the trouble to examine the passages of Bacon’s obscure and ponderous works will find that the propositions advanced by him are seldom founded on reality, but ought rather to be considered as the illusions of a lively fancy. Albertus Magnus, who flourished in the first half of the 13th century, was reputed to have discovered the art; and to give an idea of the state of the physical sciences at that time, it is worth while to quote the following recipes from his De Mirabilibus Naturae: — “Take one pound of sulphur, two pounds of willow-carbon, six pounds of rock-salt ground very fine in a marble mortar; place, when you please, in a covering made of flying papyrus to produce thunder. The covering, in order to ascend and float away, should be long, graceful, well filled with this fine powder; but to produce thunder, the covering should be short, thick, and half full.” (Quoted in Astra Castra, p. 25.) Regiomontanus, the first real mathematician after the partial revival of learning, is said, like Archytas, to have formed an artificial dove, which flew before the Emperor Charles V. at his public entry into Nuremberg; but the date of Regiomontanus’ death shows this to have been impossible.

Attempts at flying have, as a rule, been made by a somewhat low class of projectors, who have generally united some little share of ingenuity to a smattering of mechanics. At the beginning of the 16th century an Italian alchemist visited Scotland, and was collated by James IV. to the abbacy of Tungland, in Galloway. Having constructed a set of wings, composed of various plumage, he undertook from the walls of Stirling Castle to fly through the air to France. This feat he actually attempted, but he soon came to the ground, and broke his thigh-bone by the violence of the fall—an accident he explained by asserting that the feathers of some fowls were employed in his wings, and that these had an affinity for the dunghill, whereas, if composed solely of eagles’ feathers, they would have been attracted to the air. This anecdote has furnished to Dunbar, the Scottish poet, the subject of one of his rude satires. In 1617, Fleyder, rector of the grammar school at Tübingen, delivered a lecture on flying, which he published eleven years afterwards. A poor monk, however, ambitious to reduce the theory to practice, provided himself with wings; but his machinery broke down, and falling to the ground, he broke his legs and perished. Bishop Wilkins (Mathematical Magick, 1648) says it was related that “a certain English monk called Elmerus, about the Confessor’s time,” flew by means of wings from a tower a distance of more than a furlong; that another person flew from St Mark’s steeple at Venice; and another, at Nuremberg. He also quotes Busbequius to the effect that a Turk also attempted something of the kind at Constantinople. It would probably not be very difficult to make a long list of such narrations, in some of which the experimenter is related to have been successful, and in others to have failed; but the evidence is in no case very good, and we may feel certain that all the traditions of attempts with a successful issue are false.

In Borelli’s posthumous work, De Motu Animalium, published at Rome in 1680-81, he calculated the enormous strength of the pectoral muscles in birds; and his proposition cciv. (vol. i. pp. 322-326) is entitled “Est impossibile, ut homines propriis viribus artificiosè volare possint,” in which he clearly points out the impossibility of man being able by his muscular strength to give motion to wings of sufficient extent to keep him suspended in the air. But Borelli did not, of course, as has sometimes been stated, demonstrate the impossibility of man’s flying otherwise than merely by means of his own muscular power.

A very slight consideration of the matter shows that, although the muscles of man may not be of sufficient strength to enable him to use wings, this objection does not apply against the possibility of making a flying chariot in which the motive power should be produced mechanically as in a watch, or a boat to float in the atmosphere. Both these projects have therefore always engaged the attention of abler men than has the art of flying, and it was only the ignorance of the nature and force of the atmosphere, as well as of the properties of all aeriform bodies, that caused so long a time to elapse before the invention of the balloon.

Albert of Saxony, a monk of the order of St Augustine, and a commentator on the physical works of Aristotle, seems first to have comprehended (though in a very vague and erroneous manner) the principles on which a body might be made to float in the atmosphere. Adopting, of course, Aristotelian views with regard to the nature of the elements, he considered that, as fire is more attenuated, and floats above our atmosphere, therefore a small portion of this ethereal substance, enclosed in a light hollow globe, would raise it to a certain height and keep it suspended in the air; and that, if more air were introduced, the globe would sink like a ship when water enters by a leak. Long afterwards Francis Mendoza, a Portuguese Jesuit, who died in 1626, at the age of forty-six, embraced this theory, and he held that the combustible nature of fire was no real obstacle, as its extreme levity and the extension of the air would prevent it from supporting inflammation. Casper Schott, also a Jesuit, adopted the same speculation, only that he replaced the fire by the thin ethereal substance which he believed floated above our atmosphere; but, of course, the difficulty of procuring any of this ether was a sufficient obstacle.

Similar notions have been revived at different times. They were likewise often blended with the alchemical tenets so generally received in the course of the 15th, 16th, and part of the 17th centuries. Thus Schott quotes Lauretus Laurus to the effect that if swans’ eggs or leather balls be filled with nitre, sulphur, or quicksilver, and be exposed to the sun, they will ascend. It was also believed that dew was of celestial origin, being shed by the stars, and that it was drawn up again in the course of the day to heaven by the heat of the sun. Thus Laurus states that hens’ eggs filled with dew and exposed to the solar heat will rise. He was so grossly ignorant, however, of the principles of motion, that it is not worth while even to allude to his other assertions.

Cyrano de Bergerac (born 1620) wrote a philosophical romance entitled Histoire Comique des Estais et Empire de la Dune, and Les Estais et Empire du Soleil (from which Swift is supposed to have derived the idea of writing portions of Gulliver's Travels). To equip himself for performing the journey to the moon, the French traveller fastens round his body a multitude of very thin flasks filled with the morning’s dew; the heat of the sun, by its attractive power on the dew, raised him up to the middle region of the atmosphere, whence, some of the flasks being broken, the adventurer sank again to the ground. Other aeronautical ideas occur in the romance.

Cardan proposed that ascensional power might be applied as in a rocket; and one Honoratus Fabry has described a huge apparatus, consisting of long tin pipes, worked by air compressed by the action of fire.

The most noted scheme for navigating the air promulgated previously to the successful experiments of the Montgolfiers, is due to a Jesuit, Francis Lana, and was proposed by him in a work entitled Prodromo dell' Arte Maestra, Brescia, 1670. His idea, though useless and unpractical in so far that it could never be carried out, is yet deserving of notice, as the principles involved are sound; and this can be said of no earlier attempt. His project was to procure four copper balls of very large dimensions, yet so extremely thin that after the air was exhausted from them they would be lighter than the air displaced, and so would rise; and to those four balls he proposed to attach a boat, with sails, &c., and which would carry up a man. He submitted the whole matter to calculation, and proposed that the globes should be about 25 feet in diameter and 1 / 225 th of an inch in thickness; this would give from all four balls a total ascensional force of about 1200 lb, which would be quite enough to raise the boat, sails, passengers, &c. But the obvious objection to the whole scheme is, that it would be quite impossible to construct a globe of so large a size and of such small thickness which would even support its own weight without falling to pieces if placed on the ground, much less bear the external atmospheric pressure when the internal air was removed. Lana himself noticed the latter objection, but he thought that the spherical form of the copper shell would, notwithstanding its extreme thinness, enable it, after the exhaustion was effected, to sustain the enormous pressure, which, acting equally on every point of the surface, would tend to consolidate rather than to break the metal. Of course this assumed the ball to be absolutely spherical, a state of affairs as impossible as indifferent equilibrium actually is. He proposed to exhaust the air from the globes by attaching each to a tube 36 feet long, fitted with a stopcock, and so produce a Torricellian vacuum. He was thus apparently ignorant of the invention of the air-pump by Otto Guericke about 1650; and though his project is noteworthy as the hydrostatics of it is correct, still Lana displays his ignorance of philosophical facts known in his day, quite as much as his originality; and his proposition has, since Montgolfier’s discovery, received a greater share of notice than it deserves.

So late as 1755, and not long before the invention of balloons, a very fanciful scheme was proposed by Joseph Galien, a Dominican friar, and professor of philosophy and theology in the papal university of Avignon. This visionary proposed to collect the diffuse air of the upper regions, and to enclose it in a huge vessel extending more than a mile every way, and intended to carry fifty-four times as much weight as did Noah’s ark. It is unnecessary to notice at greater length this absurd chimera, which is merely mentioned here at all because it is sometimes referred to, though only on account of the magnitude of the fantastic scheme.

It is proper here to remark, that nearly all the early projectors imagined that the atmosphere was of no great height, and that it covered the earth like a shallow ocean, having a well-defined boundary; and the aerial vessels which they proposed were intended to float on the surface of this ocean, exactly as ships do on the sea, with their upper portions in the ether or diffuse air, or whatever the fluid might be, that lay above. And these ideas were, of course, not dispelled till after the invention of the barometer and the discovery of the law of the decrease of atmospheric pressure with elevation.

Some writers have stated that Francis Bacon first published the true principles of aeronautics. This assertion we cannot help noticing, because it has really no foundation except in the propensity, fostered by indolence, which would gladly refer all the discoveries ever made to a few great names. They mistake, indeed, the character of Bacon who seek to represent him as an inventor. His claim to immortality rests chiefly on the profound and comprehensive views which he took of the bearings of the different parts of human knowlege; for it would be difficult to point out a single fact or observation with which he enriched the store of physical...