Overview

For centuries humans dreamed of flying. The ancient Greek myth of Icarus, killed attempting to fly when the wax on his artificial wings melted, was an early expression of this desire. This myth also reflected the realization that human flight would be difficult, perhaps impossible. Yet the dream persisted. Writers who speculated about future societies often included controlled human flight in their utopian fiction. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) described interplanetary journeys in several of his stories, while Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) made a huge flying island the focus of the third voyage in Gulliver's Travels. Medieval and renaissance scholars Roger Bacon (1220?-1292) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) speculated on the possibility of human flight. Da Vinci even designed a heavier-than-air machine and a parachute. But human flight remained unachieved until 1783.

Background

By the seventeenth century, scientists realized the earth was...