ARTIFICIAL FLIGHT. 



IN a year when specialists in most branches of science 

 are reviewing with jubilation the vast advances which 

 have taken place in every subject of research during the 

 Queen's reign, it is fitting that attention should be turned 

 to the many, and often heroic, attempts that have been made 

 in that period to obtain the mastery, for purposes of loco- 

 motion, of that most fickle of all elements, the atmosphere. 

 It is true that hitherto these attempts have not succeeded 

 in solving the problem of artificial flight, but progress in 

 scientific investigation must not be estimated by the actual 

 results achieved, and when the peculiar difficulties of the 

 problem are taken into account, aeronauts will have every 

 reason to be satisfied with the large amount of ground that 

 has been covered during the past sixty years in bringing 

 them nearer to the goal of their ambitions. 



A record of the past history of artificial flight takes us 

 back to the legend of Dajdalus who as the inventor of 

 sailing ships was not unnaturally accredited with having 

 attached wings to himself. In the fourteenth century, J. B, 

 Dante, a mathematician of Perugia is said to have crossed 

 Lake Trasimene on wings, but further experiments resulted 

 in his breaking a leg. In 1500 Leonardo da Vinci is said 

 to have made some ingenious experiments on flight, and in 

 the seventeenth century a romance was written by one 

 Retif de la Bretonne describing the voyage of a flying man 

 of whom a highly grotesque illustration was given. Passing 

 from fiction to fact, we find in 1678 a French locksmith 

 named Besnier experimenting with a system of double 

 wings, so contrived as to close when raised and to open 

 when depressed. 



Besnier made a few experiments ; he first jumped off a 

 stool, then he jumped off a table, then he jumped out of a 

 window, and finally he actually succeeded in jumping off the 

 top of a barn ; and lh.it Journal des Savants tells us that his 

 experiments met with relative success {succes relatif\ 



