The King decreed pain of death to
all infringers; and to assist the enterprising monk in improving
his machine, he appointed him first professor of mathematics in
the University of Coimbra with a fat stipend. Then the
Inquisition stepped in. The inventor's suave reply, to the effect
that to show men how to soar to Heaven was an essentially
religious act, availed him nothing. He was pronounced a sorcerer,
his machine was destroyed, and he was imprisoned till his death.
Many other men fashioned unto themselves wings; but, though some
of them might glide earthward, none could rise upon the wind.
While the principle by which the balloon, father of the
dirigible, soars and floats could be deduced by men of natural
powers of observation and little science from the action of
clouds and smoke, the airplane, the Winged Victory of our day,
waited upon two things--the scientific analysis of the anatomy of
bird wings and the internal combustion engine.
These two things necessary to convert man into a rival of the
albatross did not come at once and together. Not the dream of
flying but the need for quantity and speed in production to take
care of the wants of a modern civilization compelled the
invention of the internal combustion engine. Before it appeared
in the realm of mechanics, experimenters were applying in the
construction of flying models the knowledge supplied by Cayley in
1796, who made an instrument of whalebone, corks, and feathers,
which by the action of two screws of quill feathers, rotating in
opposite directions, would rise to the ceiling; and the full
revelation of the structure and action of bird wings set forth by
Pettigrew in 1867.
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