Meet the First Man to Fly Like a Bird

hey 42 here when we talk about the origins of human flight most of us automatically think of the wright brothers who first took to the skies in their modestly named right flyer in 1903 but in reality this historic flight was just one step on a long quest that mankind embarked on more than a millennium earlier you're probably familiar with the story of icarus the boy who flew too close to the sun only to fall back down to earth and drown when his wings which he and his father daedalus had crafted from feathers and wax disintegrated it's a tale from greek mythology that was probably conceived to teach us that pride comes before a very long very deadly fall but as it happens icarus and dedezales mad scheme to escape from crete on jerry-rigged bird wings is actually surprisingly similar to some of mankind's real first attempts at flight tower jumps one of the earliest recorded tower jumps was made by andalusian polymath and inventor abbas ibn fanaz in 875 a.d when he covered himself in vulture feathers strapped a carefully designed wing to each of his arms and launched himself from the tallest tower in cordoba like an enthusiastic participant in one of those red bull flug tags he's dead now of course but that's because he was born over a thousand years ago not because he threw himself off a tower and tried to fly not only did he survive this daredevil stunt some accounts from the time suggest he actually managed to sort of fly for a little bit before smashing into the ground at high speed and badly injuring his back as a result some historians credit abbas ebin fanaz as the first human being ever to fly though others believe his wing system may have acted more like a parachute slowing him down just enough that he was able to successfully not die on impact with the ground it's almost impossible to know for sure whether or not abbas ibn fanaz genuinely flew and the same can be said for several other somewhat dubious records of human flight from the distant past for example around 400 years before abbas's time rumor has it that chinese emperor wen schwann decided to punish several prisoners by forcing them to leap from the top of a tower attached to very large kites most were killed but one yuan huang tao a son of the emperor of a rival dynasty is said to have endured the punishment and lived to tell the tale then there's ottoman aviator ligari hassan chaliby who in 1663 is said to have strapped himself to 60 kilos of gunpowder in istanbul and launched himself out over the bosphorus in what might have been the world's first rocket ship whether or not these men were flyers fallers or fakers is the subject of plenty debate even today but these early pioneers if you can call them that made some of the first known attempts by humans to fly and mankind has continued its assault on the skies pretty much ever since if we want to look at the first confirmed flight of a human being we need to fast forward a bit to 1783 when a paper manufacturer named jax etienne mongolfiere ascended into the air over paris in a rather splendid looking flying machine he had designed alongside his brother joseph michelle not an aeroplane but a hot air balloon to give you an idea of just how ridiculously limited our understanding of flight was at that time just before jack setien's historic voyage opened away the montgolfier brothers launched an unmanned test flight i say unmanned but that doesn't mean there weren't passengers in fact there were three a sheep a duck and the rooster this odd trio were sent into the skies over paris for one simple reason to find out if it was safe up there the expectation was that the duck and rooster would survive the trip no problem since both animals can fly without human intervention sheep on the other hand are absolutely pathetic flyers and at the time it was assumed their physiology was pretty much the same as ours so the idea was that if the sheep survived the trip it should be safe for humans too with the arrival of the hot air balloon man had if not exactly conquered the skies at least reached them and that taste of freedom of looking down on the earth far below as though pouring over a hyper-realistic map proved addictive airships came next the first of which the zhifard dirigibla waddled its way punderously skywards in 1852. it seems the french had a bit of a stranglehold on aviation firsts in those days as it was another frenchman who designed and flew this one too henry gifford and paris was once again the location for this historic moment both hot air balloons and airships are examples of what is known as lighter than air flight as the name suggests lighter than air vehicles achieved lift by virtue of weighing less than the total volume of air they displace giving them positive buoyancy and making them float for exactly the same reason a cork floats in water lighter than air flight is fairly simple in principle and compared to its cousin heavier-than-air flight it's fairly simple to achieve in practice too sky lanterns you know those paper contraptions with a candle inside that hippies like to release at festivals have been around since at least the first century a.d and probably a few hundred years longer all the montgolfier brothers had to do to build the first hot air balloon was figure out how to scale things up a bit heavier than air flight on the other hand is another matter entirely it isn't something most of us spend much time thinking about these days but it is really kind of a miracle that a 500-ton commercial jet can haul itself six or seven miles into the sky and somehow stubbornly stay there to make that happen we humans had to overcome a frankly frightening number of scientific engineering and technological challenges these breakthroughs didn't come all at once either the likes of leonardo da vinci galileo galilei christiane hargens sir isaac newton leonard euler and many many more of the brightest minds in human history provided vital jigsaw pieces of knowledge that would later help us solve the puzzle of flight arguably the first person to fully understand how each of these pieces fit together was george kaley you may not be familiar with that name but kaylee was one of the true pioneers of aeronautics he was the first person to propose a fixed-wing flying machine with separate systems for lift propulsion and control and he identified the importance of using cambered wings to generate lift he also clarified the four forces that govern flight weight lift drag and frost despite his mastery of the principles this last force frost was causing cayley a major problem in his quest for powered flight he simply didn't have enough of it and the technology of the day didn't offer any way to get more without dramatically affecting one of the other forces weight or to put that another simpler way steam engines were really bloody heavy cayley did still manage to build the world's first heavier-than-air flying machine though a glider that flew for the first time in 1853 but he firmly believed powered flight would be possible as soon as someone was able to design and build an engine that was both powerful and lightweight and as it happens he was exactly right in 1903 a few decades after the invention of the internal combustion engine the wright brothers made their now famous flight paving the way for the development of modern aviation it's worth pointing out that the duo actually hold a somewhat niche first in the world of human flight as we've seen they weren't the first to fly nor were they the first to fly a heavier than aircraft they weren't even the first to fly a powered heavier than aircraft that was another frenchman clement ada who managed to skim along for some 50 meters at an altitude of approximately 20 centimeters in 1890 the official record held by the wright brothers is the first controlled sustained flight in a powered aeroplane which was admittedly an important step on our journey into the skies but still just one step when you consider that it took us around a millennium to advance from jumping off towers and hoping for the best to building what was basically a giant sky lantern and also hoping for the best the speed of progress we've seen since the wright brothers first flight is actually pretty staggering by the time the first world war came around just over 10 years later aeroplanes had advanced enough that plane on plane dogfights became a central part of warfare a status they've retained to this day after the war ex-fighter pilots and other aviation enthusiasts set about making the world seem like a much smaller place than it ever had before john alcock and arthur brown made the first non-stop atlantic crossing in an aeroplane in 1919. and six years later charles lindenberg became the first man to make the trip solo the first non-stop flight across the pacific came in 1931 and the following year amelia earhart shot to stardom after becoming the first woman to cross the atlantic alone more on her in an upcoming video by the way serious advances in the development of the jet engine began to be made around this time though the first operational jet aircraft wouldn't take to the skies until the latter part of the second world war whilst it may have been late to the party when it came to the war effort this new technology would go on to spark the jet age during which the jet engine completely revolutionized air travel and changed the world in the process jet powered airplanes were able to fly much higher faster and further than traditional piston-powered planes bringing just about the entire earth within a single day's travel from any given point for the first time in human history not only that but jet-powered planes were able to be far bigger meaning flights could accommodate more passengers bringing prices down significantly and opening up the skies to more and more people in 1961 humans conquered space the final frontier sorry when russian cosmonaut yuri gagarin took the vostok one where no man had gone before i'll stop now eight years later neil armstrong became the first man in history to walk on the surface of the moon it's kind of crazy when you stop and think about it in the space of just 66 years less than a human lifespan we went from an almost unimaginably primitive aeroplane built by two eccentric brothers just about lifting off the ground to cruising through 000 239.000 of vacuum and landing on the moon if your great or possibly great great grandparents happen to be born at just the right moment in history they may well have been alive before we humans mastered powered flight and after we'd set foot on a world beyond our own these days flight has become an integral part of our world well at least when corona isn't effing everything up air travel has opened up our planet in ways our ancestors couldn't ever have dreamt of allowing us to visit distant lands and exposing us to cultures we might once have only read about in books some of the pioneers in this video made more important contributions to that vision than others but it's safe to say that between them they have fundamentally changed what it means to be human this hard-fought victory against gravity through sheer human tenacity bravery and ingenuity is arguably up there with man's greatest achievements or at least that's how it looks to us but imagine just for a second what this whole sorry story might look like from the perspective of a bird to one of our feathered friends watching abbas ebin fanaz tar and feather himself before leaping up a tower half-maiming himself in the process this millennia-spanning struggle of a bunch of hairless apes just trying to get themselves off the damn ground is probably pretty hilarious how many man-hours must we as a species have put into our quest to fly hundreds of thousands millions and yet your average african swallow unladen or otherwise can do things in the air that would make the world's most advanced fighter pilot wet himself whilst desperately fumbling for the ejector switch sort of put things in perspective doesn't it thanks for watching check out my new podcast random interesting facts available on youtube spotify apple podcast and anywhere else you get your podcasts link in the description below thanks

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 507,578

Keywords:

Id: -8h7GXgG41c

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021