Flight

Eagle-powered flight.

When Icarus and his father were escaping from a Cretan prison on wings made of wax and feathers, the young man ignored Daedalus’ warning not to fly too near the sun. The wax melted and Icarus fell into the sea south of Samos…
— Crowell’s Handbook of Classical Mythology, Harper & Row, 1970.

If a man is provided with a length of gummed linen cloth with a length of 12 yards on each side and 12 yards high, he can jump from any great height whatsoever without any injury.
— Leonardo da Vinci, notebook, 1483.

September 4: My nephew Edmond White launched a balloon on our down, made of soft thin paper; & measuring about two feet & a half in length, & 20 inches in diameter. The buoyant air was supplied at bottom by a plug of wooll, wetted with spirits of wine, & set on fire by a candle. The air being cold & moist, this machine did not succeed well abroad: but in Mr Yalden’s stair-case, it rose to the ceiling, & remained suspended as long as the spirits continued to flame, & then sunk gradually. These Gent: made the balloon themselves … but the position of the flame wanted better regulation; because the least oscillation set the paper on fire.

October 21: Edmond White launched an air-balloon from Selborne-down, measuring 8 feet and 1/2 in length, & 16 feet in circumference. It went off in a steady and grand manner to the east, and settled in about 15 minutes near Todmoor on the verge of the forest.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), Journal, (1784), MIT Press, 1970.

Jan. 7: On this day Mr Blanchard and Dr Jeffries rose in a balloon from Dover-cliff, & passing over the channel towards France, landed in the forest De Felmores, just 12 miles up into the country. They are the first aëronauts that have dared take a flight over the Sea!!
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), Journal, (1785), MIT Press, 1970.

We are now cruising at fifty-three thousand feet, with a ground speed of thirteen hundred fifty-five miles per hour. As we burn off fuel, the aircraft will float up to a peak altitude of roughly fifty-nine thousand feet. The outside air temperature is sixty degrees below zero Celsius, and the aircraft skin temperature is about one hundred degrees Celsius, this caused by friction as we pass through the air. One side effect of this is that the aircraft expands, becoming roughly eleven inches longer in midflight.
— Concorde pilot’s announcement in Tom Clancy, Patriot Games, 157.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
— Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.

No less an authority than Dr. B. W. Richardson, of London, spoke as follows at a tricycle club dinner in December, 1882: — “He (Dr. Richardson) remembered that it was said by Dr. Lardner that no vessel would ever be propelled across the Atlantic by steam. In like manner another philosopher had said that it would be impossible for a man to rotate himself more than six miles an hour, but he believed several tricylists and bicylists travelled twelve or fourteen miles an hour, and some experts had reached eighteen miles an hour, rivalling, in some respects, the steam-engine itself. He did not think he would be a false prophet if he assumed that the first principles of the problem of ærial flight would originate from the tricycle and bicycle…”
— The Queenslander, 8 September 1883, 412.

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