by Madeleine Gaenge
Humanity’s relationship with flight is a story filled with dreams and hopes, but also one with numerous failures and setbacks. Yet each of these has played a part in bringing us, as a species, to where we are today in the history of aviation, a point where we no longer merely cover short distances, but can even fly into space with ease and even return back to Earth safely.
The history of aviation reaches much further back than one might initially expect. Thousands of years passed between the earliest recorded dreams of a “sky within reach,” the longing to soar as freely as birds, and the sophisticated aviation technology we know today.
Although the Greek legend of Daedalus and Icarus was not written down until the 8th century A.D., the oral tradition has likely been around since the Bronze Age, around 1600 B.C., making it one of the earliest accounts of human flight. In this ancient myth, Daedalus and his son Icarus build wings out of wax and feathers to escape from the prison of King Minos of Crete. Despite his father’s warnings, Icarus flies too close to the sun, causing the wax on his wings to melt and ultimately leading to his fatal fall. Although Daedalus himself manages to reach Naples alive, he vows to never approach the sky again, as it is a place meant solely for the gods themselves and simply too dangerous for any mortal.
There are many stories from antiquity and the early Middle Ages about kings and other noblemen who failed in their attempts to fly. The message of these tales is clear: humans are simply not made to fly and are therefore better off keeping both feet firmly on the ground. Unfortunately (or perhaps inevitably), humans have never been particularly good at taking such sensible advice. Instead of giving up, they did what humans do best: ignored the warning, looked at the sky, and thought, “But what if we tried just one more time?”
One of these people was Eilmer of Malmesbury, an English monk, that jumped from the tower of Malmesbury Abbey with wings attached to his hands and feet. Despite the severe and permanent injuries caused by the subsequent fall, Eilmer remained firmly convinced that humans are capable of flying. He believed his failure was merely the result of a design flaw on his part.
The British monk was not alone in this view, as many who came after him realized that while humans are anatomically incapable of flight, it must be entirely possible with the right equipment. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, devoted a great deal of his time to finding a workable solution. He produced around 500 sketches on this topic, and even though he understood the fundamental challenges, the skills and materials needed for a successful first flight test simply did not exist back then in the 15th century.
Few ideas from the Renaissance and Baroque periods were as scientifically and technically sophisticated as Da Vinci’s. Bishop Francis Godwin, for example, also dreamed of flight in his work Man in the Moone, though his plan relied on a flock of carefully trained wild swans to carry him skyward in a gondola. Charming as this image may be, it belongs rather more to the realm of creative storytelling than to that of practical engineering.
A more realistic design was proposed in 1670 by the Italian monk Francesco Lana de Terzi, based on the work of Blaise Pascal and Otto von Guericke. His idea was based on a boat and called for a central mast with a sail, as well as four additional masts to which thin spheres made of copper foil were attached. The air inside these spheres was to be pumped out to create a vacuum, making them lighter than the surrounding air and thus generating lift.
The attempt made by the Marquis de Bacqueville in year 1742 was considerably simpler. Like Eilmer of Malmesbury before him, he tried flying with wings attached to his hands and feet. It should come as no surprise that this attempt, too, failed miserably.
All of these attempts, whether rooted in careful observation, bold engineering, or sheer imagination, share a common thread: they brought humanity one step closer to understanding what it truly takes to leave the ground. Each failure, no matter how dramatic, refined the questions, sharpened the methods, and inspired those who followed to think differently rather than give up.
It is therefore no coincidence that the breakthrough finally came not from imitating birds, but from rethinking the very principles of flight. In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers achieved the first successful manned ascent with their hot-air balloon, proving that sustained human flight was not only possible, but controllable. Unlike the earlier attempts, their design did not fight against nature, but worked with it by using heated air to generate lift in a way that was both simple and effective.
Even though hardly any of the ideas before the Montgolfier brothers can really be called even remotely successful, one look at these ideas from the past shows that humanity has always benefited from creative minds who had the courage to explore, experiment, and dream of the supposedly impossible. What once seemed like a distant fantasy had, at last, become reality, marking not the end of the journey, but the beginning of aviation as we know it.
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