Today, we learn that men actually flew 1000 years
ago. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The twelfth-century English
historian William of Malmesbury records an event that
took place just after the year 1000. He tells us in
these words about the Anglo-Saxon monk Eilmer of
Wiltshire Abbey:
Eilmer ... was a man learned for those times ...,
and in his youth had hazarded a deed of remarkable
boldness. He had by some means, I scarcely know what,
fastened wings to his hands and feet so that,
mistaking fable for truth, he might fly like
Daedalus, and, collecting the breeze on the summit of
a tower, he flew for more than the distance of a
furlong. But, agitated by the violence of the wind
and the swirling of air, as well as by awareness of
his rashness, he fell, broke his legs, and was lame
ever after. He himself used to say that the cause of
his failure was forgetting to put a tail on the back
part.
In other words, this almost-unknown monk actually
achieved a modestly successful glider flight over a
distance of two football fields -- including the end
zones. In fact, the story is given credence by that
fact that Eilmer eventually crashed because his
glider didn't have a tail to provide lateral
stability.
How often we think of flight as something that's
occurred only in the lifetime of people who are still
living! Yet not only the dream of flight, but the
fact of it as well, have been with us for millennia.
The American historian Lynn White digs deeper and
finds that Eilmer's flight had its own historical
antecedents. He finds two somewhat sketchy accounts
that indicate that a successful glider flight was
made in the year 875 by a Moorish inventor named Ibn
Firnas, living in Cordoba, Spain. It's entirely
possible that word of Ibn Firnas's flight was brought
to Eilmer by returning Crusaders.
An important thing about Eilmer's and Ibn Firnas's
inventions of the glider is that both occurred in
intellectual environments that fostered invention.
Ibn Firnas lived during the Golden Age of Islamic art
and science, and Eilmer belonged to the Benedictine
order, which saw God Himself as a master craftsman.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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