Bungled Attempts at One-Person Flights

Nowadays almost every urban center has an airport, and the idea of flying across an ocean seems normal. Yet this wasn't always the case. Join Katie and Sarah as they explore the fascinating stories of the people who tried -- and failed -- to fly.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And today we're
gonna be talking a little bit about the history of aviation.
But it's not going to be Amelia Earhart or Charles

(00:23):
Lindberg or the Wright Brothers. It's going to be something
a little less illustrious. And those are some bungled attempts
at one person flight. And I know when I was little,
I genuinely thought that I could fly if I just
concentrated hard enough. I did too. I actually took it
one step further and took flying lessons when I was

(00:43):
in kindergarten, And looking back, I always thought it was
the difference between being five years old and six years old.
And my friend was kind of putting me on about
teaching me how to fly. But we talked about it
recently and she said she knew she couldn't fly, but
she honestly believed that if she coached me enough, I
might be able to. Well, I'm glad your attempts went

(01:06):
a little bit better than some of the other ones
on our list. Yeah, I'm glad we learned earlier that
flying is not easy unless you're in a plane or something.
Unlike the story of Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid's Metamorphoses,
Datals was an inventor and for himself and his son
he need wings that of wax and feathers so they
could escape from the island of crete. But Dadalis warned

(01:28):
Agris not to go too close to the sun or
the wax would melt. But he did, and he fell
into the ocean and perished. And that idea of building
wings with feathers, that feathers were the real key to flight,
and that the bird wing was like the perfect form
to fly with, really is a theme through all of

(01:49):
these bungled attempts. People can't let go of the idea
that feathers are would make you fly. And that brings
us to the story of al Jawari, who lived in Nissaba,
Arabia around one thousand a d. He was a Turkish
scholar from for Rob and sometime between one thousand two
and one thousand ten, he tied two pieces of wood

(02:11):
to his arms and jumped from a mosque in Nissubbar
And as you'll see in a lot of these stories.
He did it in front of a crowd and had
a very dramatic pronouncement before he jumped. Oh, people, no
one has made this discovery before. Now I will fly
before your very eyes. The most important thing on earth
is to fly to the skies. That I will do now.

(02:32):
But he didn't. He fell and was killed. And flight
was pretty interesting to Islamic scholars during the Middle Ages,
and it was even a sacred ideal to the turk
something um that was seriously discussed in the Middle East
long before Europe. Even around the thirteenth century. The Turkish

(02:52):
lyric poet Sultan Valid included the word ug mock I
think I'm sitting there right, I'm not sure in his poems,
which meant both heaven and to fly. So that obsession
with flight is pretty pretty early. But there were other
countries that had a long obsession with flight. Portugal was
one of them. Um. The Portuguese Air Club was formed

(03:13):
in nineteen o nine, and there was a Portuguese Air
Museum that came into being what just six years after
the right brother right, And that brings us to our
next person. Juo Torto. Torto was a nurse barber, bleeder, healer, astrologer,
and teacher, but he wanted to add a personal flyer

(03:34):
to that list. Didn't work out so well. He built
some calico cloth covered wings and to really complete the picture,
put on an eagle shaped helmet and um. On June
at five pm, precisely, he jumps from the cathedral tower
of Sant Matias Square and falls to the chapel. Unfortunately,

(03:57):
the helmet slipped, he can't see where he's going, and
he's fatally wounded in front of the crowd that's come
to see his flight. Another renaissance man who met with
a better fate, I'd say it was be Leonardo da Vinci,
and that might be because he didn't actually try to fly,
or at least we're not sure he did. He did, however,

(04:17):
invent a contraption for flight right, the complex ornithopter, and
he drew these very detailed pictures of it, but no
one sure if he if he did build the model
or test it at all. One of Leonardo's associates, Cardanis,
wrote in fifteen fifty that Leonardo had tried quotes in
vain to get this ornithopter to fly, but it hadn't worked.

(04:40):
So perhaps there were a few not so successful attempts.
Leonardo is pretty famous for designing all these amazing machines though,
and not actually seeing them through. That's why we can
still build them today and find out what they were
really like. Right, We've got another article I now and
him and whether or not he built it primitive version

(05:00):
of the car that John Fuller also wrote, which I
had encourage you to check out. One of Leonardo's contemporaries
did actually get off the ground, though, Giovanni Battista Dante,
who was an Italian mathematician. He glued feathers to his arms,
um so the standard model of personal flight, and just

(05:21):
flaps and he's got trial flights at Lake Tasmino, but
it doesn't go so well and he has a violent
crash on the roof of St. Mary's Church. But there's
another renaissance man who's about one hundred years after these two,
and he's still stuck on this bird's wing theory, thinking
he can make it work. So he made wings out

(05:42):
of whalebone, of course, covering them with feathers because they
knew that had something to do with the flight thing,
and made them into a curved sort of shape with springs,
and he did make a bit of a flight. It
lasted about four hundred yards and then he fell through
a roof and broke his legs. That was pale. Oh
good Otti, So yeah, the Renaissance Italian attempts aren't particularly illustrious.

(06:06):
I think he decided that he'd stick to painting from
then on. So now we'll go across the Channel to
a man named John Williams, who turned out to be
the Archbishop of York, And like Sarah and I, as
a child, John Williams was convinced that he could fly.
This is in fifteen eighty nine, so I guess it

(06:27):
was every child's dream even then. But he actually jumps
from the walls of Conway Castle in Wales into the sea.
He's walking along and is so taken by the idea
that if he jumps he can fly place. He's wearing
a really long coat and he hopes that the coat
will billow out, I guess, like some sort of parachute um. Unfortunately,

(06:48):
he falls on the rocks and is injured in a
very unfortunate way because he was castrated. Although they wrote
it a bit more delicately in the Renaissance John Hackett
wrote that falling on the stone caused a secret infirmity
fitter to be understood than further described. Our next story
comes from France, but it is just a story. It's

(07:09):
a moral tale about the dangers of flight, and it
was written by a man named Philippe Lepicard, who wrote
about a laborer who was known for his drinking, and
then one day, when he had too much to drink,
he decided to make himself a flying apparatus. He cuts
a winnowing basket in half and uh fashion some wings

(07:32):
out of those, But then he decides that to look
and act more like a bird, to really be the bird,
he needs a tail, so he uses a shovel and
kind of sticks it behind his pants and jumps off
a pear tree with this contraption and ends up breaking
a shoulder where you know. Then from then on he

(07:53):
can't he can't continue on his drunken inventions and doesn't
work out. And this is a sixteenth century story, But
flight had been somewhat of a moral issue for quite
a while in the eighteenth century in France. There were
even proposed laws that would details strict control over how

(08:13):
flying machines could be used and could be built. People
were worried about criminal misuse of flight, that you could
go places you weren't supposed to go at a time,
you know, when walls were a pretty big deal. And
in the seventeenth century a man named Johann Daniel Major
wrote about a world I'm quoting from John's article in
which treachery, robbery, and assassination would be heaped upon one another.

(08:36):
Towns and castles, whole provinces and kingdoms would presumably soon
be obliged to fill the air, either by means of
the frequent firing of cannon or by stirring uprising smoke
to protect themselves against total invasion. But that premonition didn't
bother Benny the Locksmith, also from France, back in sixteen
seventy eight. He's an interesting case of somebody who lives

(08:58):
a life totally separate it from flight. You know, he's
not always pursuing building these contraptions, but just one day
wakes up and decides, I am going to fly. Benny
It designs an apparatus made of two wooden rods placed
on the shoulders, and each has two wings attached to them. Now,

(09:18):
the rods also tie onto the pilot's feet and you
can kind of flap. This is a good thing to
go to the article and actually check out the picture
of this, because it's pretty hard to to visualize if
you're not actually seeing it, and when you look at it,
it doesn't It looks like a big mess of sticks
with some paper attached. It doesn't look like it would work.

(09:39):
But it's actually better than most of these attempts. Um
he's able to jump from low heights. He doesn't try
to just start flapping from the ground, but he's able
to jump from low heights first chairs and tables, and
then then a little bit higher and he can He's
actually okay at gliding down to the ground smoothly. Long
attempts at flight, however, don't work out. I don't know.

(10:02):
I would have been satisfied with just a little glide
when I was a little maybe, just not like a
violent crash and a broken leg or death. Which brings
us to the Marquis de back Ville, who one day
just again woke up and decided that today was the
day he was going to fly, despite the fact that
he had it appears no interest in aviation up until

(10:22):
this time. That was just his day, and in fact,
he was going to fly from one side of the
sun to the other. He wanted to leave from his
mansion in Paris and fly about five hundred to six
hundred feet to land in the Tuilerie. And he gathers
a large crowd on this you know day, they always
like that too. Yes, what you want to show what everybody?

(10:44):
You're going to accomplish this flight. And he had again
large wings that looked a lot like paddles that he
had on both his hand and his feet. He looks
kind of like a human ping pong paddle. Actually looks ridiculous.
And he jumped from a terrace on his mansion, starts
to float toward the garden and he's going to make

(11:05):
exactly Everyone thinks, oh, he's going to make it, and
then he kind of starts wavering back and forth and
then slams into the deck of a barge and breaks
his leg. And that was his one and only attempt
at flight. Our final Frenchman is the Abbe Pierre Deforge,
who was a French clergyman born about seventeen twenty three,
and he was a pretty controversial figure in his lifetime.

(11:27):
He was imprisoned in the best Deal for almost a
year because he believed that Catholic priests and bishop should
be allowed to marry. That's the kind of thing that's
going to get you into trouble. Um. But he's he's
basically seen by the authorities as somebody who's eccentric but
essentially harmless. And I like his tactic towards this whole

(11:48):
flying thing, because I'm sure he'd heard about these other
failed attempts. And so the abbe makes some wings, but
instead of trying them at himself, he tries to convince
someone else to do it for him. Handy peasant, Yes, peasants,
they are so handy. He covers this peasant in feathers
from head to toe, leads him up to a belfry,

(12:09):
and then he tells him, you know, you should really
just start flapping farms, and then you should just throw
yourself out into the air. It's totally going to work. Um.
The peasant, probably the best declines, and so instead, deforaged
decides he'd like to make a real flying machine, and
he needs to get up some money and some time
and set himself to doing that. Yeah, before he had

(12:31):
been studying the mating habits of swallows in prison, so
I guess that's where he was stuck on the feather
and bird idea. But his next attempt is is, you know,
like you said, more of a flying machine. It's a
six ft long gondola covered by a canopy and attached
with wings which have a wingspan of twenty ft. So
that sounds a little bit more promising, but also a

(12:53):
lot heavier. So the abbe this time gets four peasants
not to to do the deed for him, but to
to push him off the tower he's gonna jump from.
This is my favorite line from John's article. So this
time defourge was the one flying, as he most likely
assumed that word had spread among the peasants to look

(13:13):
out for any clergyman seeking aid near heights. So, in
front of a large crowd, the peasants push him over
the edge and plunk, you know, he falls straight to
the ground. And he does okay, he's not crushed or
smashed on the castrated or castrated. He breaks an arm
um and and that's the end of his flying career.

(13:36):
But the crowd is beyond unimpressed. One of the onlookers,
Baron von Grimm, said that, you know, they weren't going
to burn him as a sourcer or anything, but this
flying contraption was enough for them to put him in
the madhouse. And our final somewhat madman is King Bladud,
who reportedly lived around but we should say King Bladud

(13:59):
is probably doably a legendary figure, even though he might
have had a contemporary counterpart. And I would like to
interject here that he is now rivaling our affections with
Jubatu for favorite historical names. Yeah, he's he's up there
for sure. So the mythical King la Dud was practiced
in necromancy, or communication with the spirits of the dead,

(14:23):
and so he used this this power to build a
pair of wings that he attached to his arms, and
he made a flight attempt, jumping from the Temple of
Apollo while wearing his wings. Unfortunately, the spirits didn't really
give him the right idea for how to build wings,
and he falls to his death. And after he falls,

(14:45):
supposedly he was buried in New Troy and succeeded by
his son Lear. And if that name sounds familiar, think
of Shakespeare's King Lear, because that was who was based
on this sy Leer was so upset exactly And on
an interesting side note, Bladud didn't isn't just known for
this a bungle flight attempt. Supposedly he also discovered the

(15:08):
healing springs of Bath, England with his pigs, and because
of that there are a hundred model pigs placed around
Bath in two thousand and eight to honor him. So,
if Sarah and I decide to make any more flight attempts,
we're going to head to Heartsfield Jackson and we're not
going to put feathers on our arms. We're going to

(15:28):
get a peasant to do it for us. Yeah. I
think that it's the lesson from from this podcast, And
if you'd like to read more about the stories we've
just told, check out the article top ten bungled attempts
at one person flight by John Fuller from our Stuff
from the B Side podcast on our home page at
www dot house stuff works dot com. For more on

(15:49):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com and be sure to check out the stuff
you missed in History Glass blog on the how stuff
works dot Com home page. B do Believe