had been in not giving himself a tail for stability.
He was working on that problem when his boss,
the abbot, banned him from any more flying
stunts. Eilmer is known as ‘The Flying Monk’.

More than 400 years after Eilmer took to the

skies above Wiltshire, Leonardo da Vinci began

thinking about how a man might fly, and he

designed various flying contraptions including

a parachute, a kind of helicopter and a thing

called an ‘ornithopter’. The ornithopter was

a man-powered flying machine that the pilot

operated by using his hands and feet to push

levers that would flap wings. It’s unlikely that

Leonardo ever built his ornithopter and, given

that the materials available to him would have

been limited – basically wood and canvas – it

would probably have been too heavy to fly using

only the pilot’s muscle power. His parachute

worked, though. In 2000, using Leonardo’s

design and fifteenth-century materials and

tools, British skydiver Adrian Nicholas built

the huge pyramid of wood and canvas. The

parachute was lifted to 3,000 metres (10,000

feet) by a hot-air balloon, then released with

Nicholas dangling beneath. He claimed it gave

as smooth a ride as any modern parachute.

Gliding and parachuting are all very well, but

they’re not powered flight. The pilot is flying,

and in control, but is not providing the power

that will keep him up there. When Wilbur and

Orville Wright made their first flight in 1903,

helping us to understand how an aircraft could

be flown and controlled, their aeroplane was

powered, but by an engine. The first man to

leave the ground in a flying machine powered

purely by himself was French professional

cyclist Gabriel Poulain.

Poulain was competing for a prize of 10,000
francs (worth about £400 at a time when most
people in Britain were earning less than £3 per

Top: Icarus came a

cropper when his wings

melted because he flew

too close to the sun –

not a problem I expected

to have to deal with.

Bottom: Leonardo da

Vinci designed a human

powered hang-glider that

experts believe would have

flown, although one man

would never have been

strong enough to provide

enough lift for take off.

DISCOVERING THE WORLD OF HUMAN POWERED FLIGHT   81