JOHN BULL IN THE AIR

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 143, 20 June 1925, Page 16

JOHN BULL IN THE AIR

THE SAGA OF THE FLYING MAN.

It is a remarkable fact that though the desire to fly, classicly represented in the Psalmist's "0 that I had wings like a dove," is one of man's oldest and very, natural aspirations, the realisation of it is a matter of almost yesterday. And it is even more remarkable that the much more recent development of the true line of progress, the heavier-than-air machine, should be so obscured that the pioneering Yorkshire baronet, Sir George Cayley (1773-1857), is not to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography " writes J, M. Bulloch in the ''Sunday Times."

The saga of the flying man begins in England as early as the "history" of Geoftrey of Monmouth (1100-54), who applies it to Bladud, the mythical tenth" •lvmg of Britain, who was killed in the attempt in 852 B.C. Roger Bacon began \° speculate on the subject, declaring in l<*so that "it's possible to make engines for flying, a man sitting in the midst thereof. That possibility wa^ realised by the speculation of the eighteenth-cen-tury chemists on gas; and in 1783 Count I'rancesco Zambeccari astonished London by sending up a "flying globe" from the house of a fellow countryman in Glieapside. But if the balloon rose in the air it soon descended to the depths as a mere exhibition of showmanship, despite the scientific intervention of Glaisher and Coxwell in the 'sixties of last century It was on the advice of Glaisher that Frederick William Bfearey put forward the idea in 1866 that "the balloon should be used only as a buoyant auxiliary " and the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain thereon arose, to foster and develop the "science of aeronautics which has stagnated for many-years." Brearey found his real inspiration in Sir George Uayley, for his father had witnessed some of the experiments with fiyiriomachines which the baronet had made at his Yorkshire seat fifty years before.. While- the "Father of British Aeronautics 'as a little boy had been fascinated by Montgolfier's discovery of the balloon, he early divined that the problem was one for the physicist rather tnan the chemist, and made his first experiment in aeronautics with a Chinese flying top" just ten years after ZambecCan s release of the "flying globe." Cavley wrote about the subject in littleknown scientific papers for 40 years but so little attention was paid to him that it is no wonder that he seems to have begun to doubt himself, for though his earliest experiments and ideas lay in the direction of mechanical flight, his ultimate faith in the success of aerial navigation was based on the possibilities of the'navigible balloon.