Aircraft. History of invention

People have dreamed of getting up in the air and hovering there like birds, since ancient times. Observations of birds used to suggest that for a flight a person needs wings. The ancient Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus tells how the first homemade aircraft was designed - wings of feathers, waxed. Following the mythical heroes, many daredevils developed their own designs for the wings. But their dreams of climbing into the sky did not come true, it ended in disaster.

The next stage in the attempt to invent a working aircraft was the use of moving wings. They were set in motion by the power of the feet or hands, but only clapped, and they were not able to lift the whole structure into the sky.

Did not stay away and Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo's designs of flying machines with moving wings driven by the power of human muscles are known. The first aircraft, which was designed by an ingenious Italian scientist and inventor, is considered the prototype of the helicopter. Leonardo depicted the scheme of the device, equipped with a huge propeller of starch-impregnated linen material with a diameter of 5 meters.

According to the designer, four men had to rotate special levers in a circle. Modern scientists say that in order to bring this design into motion, the strength of the muscles of four people was not enough. But if Leonardo da Vinci used a powerful spring as a starting mechanism, his aircraft could make a short, but a real flight. Da Vinci did not stop designing the structures for flights, he designed devices that could soar with the help of wind force, and in the 1480s he drew a drawing of the device "for jumping from any height without harm to man." The device shown in the picture differs little from the modern parachute.

No matter how surprising this sounded, the first flying machine that climbed into the sky was devoid of wings. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Montgolfier brothers, the French Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel, invented a bulky balloon. This aircraft, filled with warm air, could lift cargo or people. The first person to rise in the sky on the balloon was the compatriot of inventors Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier. And a month later he made the first free flight in a balloon in the company with the Marquis d'Arlande. It happened in 1783.

The balloon-hot air balloon moved by the will of the wind, people thought about flying flights. In 1784, just a year after the first balloon flight, the well-known scientist, mathematician, inventor and military engineer Jacques Meunier introduced the airship project (in French this word means "controlled"). He came up with an elongated streamlined form of airships, a way to attach the gondola to the balloon, a ballonet inside the shell to make up for the gas leak. And most importantly - Meunier's airplane was equipped with an air screw, which, rotating, had to push the design forward.

Only to embody the genius idea of Jacques Meunier in those days was not possible, a suitable propeller was not yet invented.

In any case, it is thanks to the development of scientists of past centuries and their homemade aircraft that it became possible to develop modern aviation and the emergence of fast, capacious and reliable aircraft.