As a lame old man, Oliver of Malmesbury, an eleventh-century English monk, was the first person to see a comet that was later said to have been a warning of the Norman invasion. That, though, was not the reason why centuries later a pub in Malmesbury was named in his honor. His limp had more to do with it. In fact, he was lucky to reach a grand old age at all.
The pub was called the Flying Monk in honor of Oliver’s leap from an abbey watchtower 150 feet high while clad in a pair of homemade cloth wings. He was reported to have been in the air for nearly 15 seconds before crashing to the ground and breaking both legs—a failure he put down to forgetting to use a tail. But in breaking his legs, Oliver was one of the luckier birdmen.
For most of mankind’s time on Earth, attempts to fly like a bird were likely to end in death. That was what happened to Icarus. Legend has it that he escaped from Crete with his father, Daedalus, on feather and wax wings, but he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell to his death. Then there was Bladud, a ninth-century B.C.E. king of the Britons, reputedly the father of King Lear. Although no documentary evidence exists, Bladud supposedly founded the city of Bath, using magic to create the hot springs. And all this after curing himself of leprosy, contracted in Athens, by covering himself in mud after observing that pigs didn’t suffer from the affliction. Wearing wings built with help from the spirits of the dead, Bladud leapt from a London tower and killed himself.
Human beings have, it seems, never been content simply to let flight remain the preserve of the birds. Throughout antiquity beasts such as lions and lizards—and, in the case of Pegasus, a horse—have been given wings and the power of flight and turned into griffins, dragons, and the like (although it wasn’t until the twentieth century that Walt Disney managed to get an elephant aloft, in the animated film Dumbo). But when it came to powered human flight, man’s first recorded attempts fared no better than those of their mythical predecessors.
This man’s expression was typical of a look found on the faces of most early aviators.
Just after the turn of the first millennium C.E., a Turkish scholar by the name of Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari climbed to the top of a mosque in Nishabur with a pair of wooden wings strapped to his arms. From the roof, he revved up the large crowd that had gathered to witness his achievement. “Oh, people!” he shouted. “No one has made this discovery before. Now I will fly before your very eyes. The most important thing on earth is to fly to the skies. That I will do now!” He jumped, and then, just a few seconds later, he slammed into the ground and died.
Unlike Oliver of Malmesbury, fifteenth-century polymath and genius Leonardo da Vinci remembered to include a tail on his ornithopter design. Yet despite Leonardo’s ground-breaking work in other areas, such as human anatomy, his elegant design still depended on the assumption that the human body was sufficiently strong to keep itself in the air. It would be another 200 years before it became apparent that it was not.
This leads one to wonder quite what Robert Hooke, the respected curator for scientific experiments at London’s Royal Society, was getting at when in 1674 he noted in his diary that he’d told a fellow member “that I could fly, [but] not how.” His claim remained unsubstantiated and also highly unlikely because, around the same time, the Italian scientist Giovanni Borelli, taking a break from inventing submarines and underwater breathing apparatus, concluded that men’s muscles were too weak for them “to be able to fly craftily by their own strength.” He was right.
But still the birdmen kept jumping, and limbs kept snapping. A little over twenty years after Leonardo’s death in 1519, a Portuguese man, João Torto, launched himself from a cathedral equipped with calico-covered wings and an eagle-shaped helmet. He was fatally wounded on “landing.” A century after Leonardo designed his ornithopter, his compatriot Paolo Guidotti crashed through a roof wearing wings of whalebone and feathers and broke his thigh. Then, in 1742, a 62-year-old French aristocrat called the Marquis de Bacqueville tried to fly across the Seine from a terrace at the top of his riverside mansion. He smashed into a barge and broke his leg. In 1770 French clergyman Pierre Desforges broke his arm after failing to persuade anyone to test-fly his contraption from a church lookout tower on his behalf.
Real progress toward controlled manned flight only really came about once the idea took hold that flapping like a bird was not the best way to stay airborne. The first person to grasp this was the British engineer Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet and owner of Brompton Hall near Scarborough in Yorkshire. Inspired as a boy in 1783 by the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloon flight over Paris, Cayley made it his life’s work to understand the principles of flight.
Leonardo da Vinci called his flapping wing device an “ornithopter,” a word derived from the Greek for “bird” (ornithos) and “wing” (pteron). Neither the word nor the device caught on.
“Glider King” Otto Lilienthal takes to the air near Berlin in the early 1890s.
Realizing that the steam engines of the day were too heavy for his purposes, Cayley designed his own internal combustion engine using an alternative fuel he called “oil of tar” (gasoline). This fuel, however, was prohibitively expensive, and it would take nearly another century to create a practical fossil fuel–powered aircraft engine. Nonetheless, Cayley became part of the birdman business. After observing the flight of birds, he designed an unmanned glider that first took to the air in 1804. He was soon claiming that his work was contributing to a goal that “will in time be found of great importance to mankind.” By 1853, four years before he died, he had persuaded his coachman to fly across a shallow Yorkshire valley in a larger glider. There were no broken limbs this time, yet Cayley’s pilot was reported to have said to his boss, “I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, not to fly.”
He was wise not to want to push his luck. Cayley’s “noble art of aerial navigation” was still in its infancy, as the next birdman to advance manned flight found to his cost. German engineer Otto Lilienthal published his seminal work Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation in 1889 at the age of 41. He flew his first glider two years later. Over the next five years he made some 2,000 flights, accumulating just 5 flying hours. Still, the “Glider King,” as he was dubbed, had flown longer and further than anyone else in history. But on August 9, 1896, during his second flight of the day, his glider stalled. He crashed to the ground and broke his back. Two days later, like so many previous birdmen, he died from his injuries.
The Glider King’s influence, however, was immense, directly inspiring aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright. And unlike the birdmen who had preceded him, Lilienthal had understood exactly what he was doing and why it mattered. Just before slipping into unconsciousness for the last time, 36 hours after his crash, Lilienthal whispered to his brother, “Sacrifices have to be made.” With those prescient last words, which sum up the story of aviation, he laid claim to being the first person with the Right Stuff.
But it’s not what Lilienthal said on his deathbed that really captures what this book is about—although there’s plenty of the Right Stuff to come—so much as something he said when he was very much alive: “To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.” That’s what this book is about.
In the pages that follow there are some what-ifs, a few designs that never made it, and there’s a romance about them certainly—but only because we can glimpse their potential and attach to them the feelings they’d provoke if they were real. An airplane that makes it off the drawing board makes the heart beat a little faster. But that moment when an aircraft’s nose rises from the runway . . . that’s when it really starts to matter.
