The Race to Space: Countdown to Liftoff

Besnier was a French locksmith who became obsessed with human flight, so in 1678 he developed a harness to achieve just that. Besnier’s flying apparatus looked absolutely ridiculous—it used two wooden paddles strapped to each of his limbs as part of a “flapping mechanism.” The crazy thing is—it worked! Well, sort of. He managed to glide short distances surprisingly well, but longer distances proved challenging and dangerous.

Clement Ader’s bat-like steam-powered monoplane, the Avion III

An eccentric French clergyman, Pierre Desforges, was convinced humans could fly like birds if only they had wings. In 1770 he constructed a pair of wings, but instead of trying them out himself, he tried to get peasants to volunteer for him. Later on he attached a twenty-foot wingspan to a six-foot gondola and tried to soar off one of his church’s lookout towers—he didn’t. Instead, his gondola crashed to the ground. Miraculously, he had only a broken arm to show for it.

Clément Ader was a French inventor who invested almost all his time and money in developing experimental flying machines with little or no success. His most promising attempt, though, was a wooden and linen, bat-like steam-powered monoplane called the Avion III. The 880-pound aircraft had a fifty-two-foot wingspan. In 1897 the military gave the “aircraft” a test run. Unfortunately, the most it could do was hop a few inches off the ground. The military immediately cut funding.

Gianni Caproni’s monstrous Capronissimo Ca. 60, a nine-winged, eight-engined, 30-foot-high flying boat (that didn’t fly)

Gustave Whitehead was a German aviation enthusiast who claimed to have flown his No. 21 monoplane in 1901, before the Wright brothers, but all evidence points to his design being aerodynamically unsound, and there was little evidence to back up his claim.

In 1921 aviation pioneer Gianni Caproni tried to create a flying boat. The Capronissimo Ca.60 was a nine-wing (!), eight-engine, thirty-foot-high, seventy-seven-foot-long boat with a wingspan of ninety-eight feet. It weighed 30,865 pounds! During its second test flight, soon after takeoff, the ridiculously expensive aircraft crashed into the water and completely broke apart. Caproni later commented, “The path of progress is strewn with suffering.”