SEEKING TO FLY BY MAN-POWER

Evening Star, Issue 22228, 4 January 1936, Page 14

SEEKING TO FLY BY MAN-POWER

The efforts of a French inventor to flap his 36ft span flying tricycle into the air are attracting some attention in France, says an American paper. So far these efforts have not met with any, considerable measure of success. Mi Dubois, the inventor, is still experimenting and has not yet left the ground for any length of time. But this' new attempt to fly with wings is indicative of a growing attitude in Europe with regard to flight. Now that huge speeds are. possible in expensive airliners, inventors are turning their attention to man-power aeroplanes, to see if, with the aid of modern research, men can fly with wings or at least by their own power. t In Germany the Frankfurt Polytechnic Society has offered a prise of 5,000 marks to the first aviator to keep 1 a mah-power aeroplane of any sort in the ah- for a flight of 650 yards. _ '• German aviators are nearing this riiark already. Early in September a flight using only his own power was made at Frankfurt by Herr Duunnbeil. This inventor, in a machine driven'by an airscrew which takes its power from pedals, fled distances of 213 and 257 yards at a height of three feet from the ground. The same aviator then flew for 250 yards at a height of 15 feet. This man-bird’s difficulty at present lies in the fact that as soon as he makes a turn the. machine drops. He is catapulted off the ground bay an arrangement of rubber bands which he works himself. To qualify for the prize he has to fly, without touching the ground, round two points 500 metres apart. Other unauthenticatod flights have been claimed for many hundred years. John Wilkins, the' noted British natural scientist, discussed in 1640 the ambitious programme of flying to the moon. In his writings he declares it to be told that a certain English monk “ named Elmerus, about the Confessor’s time, flew from a town in Spain for a distance of more than a furlong.” Wilkins also relates tales of flights with wings from St. Mark’s Venice, and at Nuremberg. At the same time there was a story of an Italian, Giovanni Battista Dante, of Perugita, who had. it was said, flown several times across Lake Trasimene. At the • beginning of the sixteenth century an Italian alchemist informed James IV of Scotland, in whose domain he was staying, that he would undertake to fly from Stirling Castle to France. The intrepid gentleman was no vain boaster. He attempted the feat, but soon came to earth. , He attributed his failure to the fact that he had stupidly used some chickens’ feathers in his wings, which were “ attracted ” by the earth, and that if he could have used the feathers of golden eagles his success would have' been assured, . as eagles’ feathers had an affinity with the air. Leonardo da Vinci invented several wings to be fitted to arms and legs to make flight ' possible. He wrote treatises on the subject, but never,'so far as is known, actually set off in any of his wings.