Man Takes wings With the help of modern Science| Man takes wings around
Discuss man Takes wings With the help of modern Science, That flying in the air has always been one of man's greatest ambitions, is proved by the fact that so many of the great heroes are provided with wings or winged horses. In modern times countless people have spent time and money and even their lives trying to make flying machines.
The Chinese claim that they were the first to fly in the air. A French missionary in China, writing in the year 1694, mentions that the people at Peking sent up a balloon in celebration of a new emperor's coming to the throne. The record of sending up balloons dates in Europe from the year 1709.
Lorenzo di Guzmas in Portugal made a trial of the balloon. It rose from the courtyard of a building called the House of the Indies in Lisbon and its ascent was watched by the king and the queen. In 1766 Cavendish, a British scientist showed that hydrogen gas was much lighter than air.
Tour of the Univers and the rotation of the earth
Many experiments on sending up balloons were made by Etieme and Joseph, the sons of a paper manufacturer, who burnt some straw under the huge paper bags constructed by them and, to their great delight, the bags went up. Soon they realised that it was not the smoke but the hot air in the bags which made them rise, and after gaining this basic knowledge, the rest was quite simple. Then these adventurous brothers made a big spherical balloon, 30 ft. in diameter and let it fly in the air in 1783.
A great crowd watched it going up to a height of about one mile and then descending very smoothly.
The next balloon was made of fine silk covered with thin India rubber.
It was it. in diameter but it weighed only 20 pounds. It was filled with hydrogen and was sent up in Paris. It rose rapidly to a height of 300 ft. and then burst into pieces which fell in a field 15 miles away.
After this they built a much bigger balloon having a small car in which a sheep, a cock and a duck were placed. It was made of linen, lined with paper and was sent up in Versailles on September 19, 1783. It stayed in the air for eight minutes and then it came down quite gently. The sheep and the duck were unhurt, but the cock was in a bad condition.
The wise men thought that the poor creature was suffering from the effects of thin air in the higher regions, but it was soon found that the cock had been trodden over by the sheep. No human being had, so far, trusted himself to the air but, a few weeks later, a brave young man, named de Rozier, came forward to make this experiment.
The balloon in which he sat was, however, a captive one, and it did not rise to more than a hundred feet. But, on November 21, 1783, de Rozier and his friend made the first free balloon ascend from Paris.
They reached a height of 500 ft. and, after remaining in the air for 20 minutes, came down safely in a field five miles away from the starting point. The first ascent in England was made by Vincent Lunardi in London on September 15, 1784. But James Sadler is usually regarded as the father of English aeronautics. He made his first ascent at Oxford, a month later than Lunardi's, and during the next thirty years, he made many more ascents. He had a number of narrow escapes, one of which was when he tried to cross the Irish Channel from Dublin.
Nowadays, balloons are used, not for ascent in the air but for taking observations of the wind and the temperatures, etc. in the upper regions up to a height of 22 miles. AIRsH1p.—The first airship was simply a balloon elongated to make it directional, and it carried a small engine and an airscrew to propel it. In 1852 Gifford made a small steam engine to propel a cigar-shaped balloon. But the power was very small.
Again, in 1884, Renard built La France, an electrically driven, semi-rigid airship, but it was very slow. In 1900 Count Zeppelin built his first air-ship, 400 ft. long. The British airships R-33 and R-34 were exact copies of Zeppelin, and R-34 which was 743 ft. long was the first aircraft to make the return journey across the Atlantic.
The latest Zeppelin built-in 1928 was 775 ft. long. These Zeppelins were filled either with Hydrogen or with Helium, a non-inflammable gas twice as heavy as hydrogen. However, it is improbable that we shall ever again build large airships as we have not been so successful with them. Two very big airships R-102 and R-101 met with disaster during their flights and similar disasters also occurred in America. AEROPLANE.—An airship is lighter than air but an aeroplane is heavier than air.
The earliest aeronauts, like Degen, Sroune and Hargrave, tried to fly with the help of very very big wings like those of a heron. Hargrave at first began a series of experiments with box-kites Later on, he used wings nearly 36 inches long and 9 inches wide. Hargrave's model flew over a distance of several hundred feet. A machine that will rise straight from the ground, hover and fly in the air and land verti.
Cally is obviously so desirable that many inventors like Edison, Leonardo Devinci etc. worked hard to bring it into being. The helicopter is the nearest approach to this ideal for it can take off from the roof of a house and can continue to hover in the air about the same place for many hours. Hence it is used for dropping food and medicine etc., in flood-stricken areas. It is also used for sprinkling germicides and insecticides on fruit-bearing trees.
The aeroplane was invented by Orville Wright and Wilbur\Vright in America. Originally they were journalists but, finding their trade not very lucrative, they formed a bicycle manufacturing company. This venture gave them enough money and leisure for making experiments with aeroplanes. For seven years they worked very hard to make a flying machine, whatever they earned, was spent to the last penny,
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