Today, we fly an old, old airplane. 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 ancient bird models in
the Cairo Museum were all pretty similar. Only one
in the set was wrong. It was made of sycamore wood
-- a little thing with a 7-inch wingspan. In 1969
Khalil Messiha, an Egyptian doctor and amateur
student of bird models, noticed it. It stood out
for him because he saw it through the eyes of his
childhood. He recalled the shapes and forms he'd
worked with when he'd built model airplanes. This
wasn't a bird at all. It was a model airplane, and
that wasn't possible.
The other birds had legs. This had none. The other
birds had painted feathers. This had none. The
other birds had horizontal tail feathers like a
real bird. Perhaps that was the most important
thing. Birds don't have to be stable in flight
because they can correct their direction. But a
model airplane needs a vertical rudder to keep it
moving straight. This strange wooden model tapered
into a vertical rudder. One can also see that the
wing has an airfoil cross-section. It was all
aerodynamically correct. Too much about the model
was beyond coincidence. Messiha's brother, a flight
engineer, reproduced it in balsa wood and launched
it. It flew. It really flew!
The model was dug up in Sakkara a hundred years
ago. Sakkara is a site of ancient ruins, but this
model is more recent. It's from the 3rd century BC,
from an age of invention that followed the death of
Alexander the Great. That so-called Hellenistic
period gave us gears, screws, plumbing, control
valves, Euclidian geometry, Archimedes, and
Ptolemy's astronomy.
And so, it seems, it also produced a modern concept
of flight. 1800 years later Leonardo da Vinci was
still trying to invent flapping-wing airplanes and
corkscrew-driven helicopters. But here, an Egyptian
had produced something with all the features of a
modern sailplane.
Did anyone actually build a large version of this
thing? Well, no one could have come this close to
the real shape of flight without working on a
larger scale. This little wooden model could hardly
exist unless someone had worked with large, light
models, or even with man-carrying versions.
Archaeologists have looked in vain for a prototype.
A large model light enough to fly would be too
delicate to stand the ravages of 2300 years. The
original -- if it ever was -- has long since joined
the desert dust. Whatever form this Egyptian
airplane might have taken, it has long since
returned to the world of dreams and imagination
from which it first came.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
