86 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



have the account of a man and his son who wished to flee from an enraged king. 

 Accordingly, they made wings of feathers stuck together with wax. The son, 

 regardless of the warnings of his father, flew so high that the heat from the sun 

 melted the wax. Thus deprived of his support he fell into the sea and was 

 drowned. We have another account of a flying dove made of wood, but neither 

 is authentic. 



It is evident from history and other sources that the ancients considered it 

 beyond man's natural powers to fly. It was regarded second only to the power 

 of Jupiter to flash the lightning and hurl the thunderbolt. Such attempts were 

 made generally by the lower class of projectors who possessed a little ingenuity 

 and a smattering of mechanics. 



In 1600 an Italian constructed a set of wings of various plumage and under- 

 took to fly from the walls of Stirling Castle to France. But he fell very shortly 

 to the ground. He gave as a reason of his sudden descent the fact that some of 

 the feathers he had used were from birds that flew close to the earth. 



One Borelli proved positively in a work issued 1680, the impossibility of 

 man by his muscular strength, to be able to give motion to wings of sufficient ex- 

 tent to keep him suspended in the air. Although this fact be true, yet it does 

 not make it impossible to have a flying chariot with power produced by machinery, 

 or a boat so constructed that it will sail in the atmosphere. Even before it was 

 clearly proved that men could not fly as birds such attempts were made, though 

 in a very rough manner. It was nothing but ignorance of the nature and force 

 of the atmosphere, as well as the properties of all aerial bodies, that caused so 

 long a time to elapse before the invention of the balloon. 



The first who comprehended, though in a very vague and erroneous manner, 

 the principles on which a body might be made to float in the air was a monk, 

 Albert of Saxony. In 1670, Francis Laua presented a still more rational view 

 of the subject, which though useless, as it was not practical, yet introduced sound 

 principles, which could be said of no earlier attempt. His idea was to have four 

 copper balls twenty-five feet in diameter and one two hundred and twenty-fifth 

 of an inch in thickness, attached to the four corners of a square basket and ex- 

 hausted of air, and thus obtain an ascending force of twelve hundred pounds. 

 But balls constructed in this manner would not even bear their own weight, much 

 less the immense pressure of the atmosphere from the outside. In 1783, the 

 real balloon was discovered by James and Stephen Montgolfier. They got their 

 idea from watching the clouds. They noticed that they were suspended in the 

 air, and thought if they could get enough of some such material in a captive state 

 it would ascend. They filled small sacks with smoke, and found sure enough 

 the smoke, or something else given off by the fire, did ascend and take the sack 

 with it. Accordingly they made a linen bag one hundred and five feet in cir- 

 cumference and filled it with smoke from a straw fire. It rose to a great height, 

 and descended in ten minutes, one and one-half miles distant. 



The news of this ascension spread rapidly all over Europe. The excitement 

 was so great that a collection was taken up in Paris, for the purpose of having the 



