Aircraft. History of invention

About getting up in the air and hovering there,like birds, people have dreamed since ancient times. Observations of birds used to suggest that wings are necessary for a flight. The ancient Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus tells how the first homemade aircraft was constructed - wings of feathers, waxed. Following the mythical heroes, many brave creatures developed their own designs for the wings. But their dreams of climbing into the sky did not come true, it ended in disaster.

The next stage in an attempt to invent a workingthe use of moving wings has become the aircraft. They were set in motion by the power of the feet or hands, but only clapped, and they could not lift the whole structure into the sky.

Did not stay away and Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo's designs of flying machines with moving wings driven by the power of human muscles are known. The first aircraft, which was designed by an ingenious Italian scientist and inventor, is considered the prototype of the helicopter. Leonardo depicted the scheme of the device, equipped with a huge propeller of starch-impregnated linen material with a diameter of 5 meters.

According to the design of the designer, four men shouldwere to rotate the special levers in a circle. Modern scientists say that in order to bring this design into motion, the strength of the muscles of four people was not enough. But if Leonardo da Vinci used a powerful spring as a starting mechanism, his aircraft could make a short-term, but a real flight. Da Vinci did not stop designing the structures for flights, he designed devices that could soar with the help of wind force, and in the 1480s he drew a drawing of the device "for jumping from any height without harm to the person." The device shown in the picture differs little from the modern parachute.

No matter how surprising this may sound, the firstThe flying machine that climbed into the sky was devoid of wings. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Montgolfier brothers, the French Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel, invented a cumbersome balloon. This aircraft, filled with warm air, could lift cargo or people. The first person to rise in the sky on the balloon was the compatriot of inventors Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier. And a month later he made his first free flight in a balloon in the company with the Marquis d'Arlande.

The balloon-hot air balloon moved by the wind,people thought about flying. In 1784, just a year after the first balloon flight, the well-known scientist, mathematician, inventor and military engineer Jacques Meunier introduced the airship project (in French this word means "controlled"). He came up with an elongated streamlined form of airships, a method of attaching a gondola to a balloon, a ballonet inside the shell to replenish a gas leak. And most importantly - Meunier's airplane was equipped with an air screw, which, rotating, had to push the design forward.

Only to embody the genius idea of ​​Jacques Meunier in those days was not possible, a suitable propeller was not yet invented.

In any case, it is thanks to the developmentsscientists of past centuries and their homemade aircraft, it became possible to develop modern aviation and the emergence of fast, capacious and reliable aircraft.