78-503: Flying machine is an archaic, early term for an aircraft. The term flying machine may also refer to: Flying machine Early flying machines include all forms of aircraft studied or constructed before the development of the modern aeroplane by 1910. The story of modern flight begins more than a century before the first successful manned aeroplane, and the earliest aircraft thousands of years before. Some ancient mythologies feature legends of men using flying devices. One of
156-507: A 14 feet (4.3 m) parachute with a rigid wooden frame. Between 1853 and 1854, Louis Charles Letur developed a parachute-glider comprising an umbrella-like parachute with smaller, triangular wings and vertical tail beneath. Letur died after it crashed in 1854. Kites are most notable in the recent history of aviation primarily for their man-carrying or man-lifting capabilities, although they have also been important in other areas such as meteorology . The Frenchman Gaston Biot developed
234-463: A French Army electric-powered airship, La France . The 170-foot (52 m) long, 66,000-cubic-foot (1,900 m ) airship covered 8 km (5 mi) in 23 minutes with the aid of an 8.5 horsepower (6.3 kW) electric motor, returning to its starting point. This was the first flight over a closed circuit. These aircraft were not practical. Besides being generally frail and short-lived, they were non-rigid or at best semi-rigid. Consequently, it
312-471: A balloon with both hot air and hydrogen gas bags, a design which was soon named after him as the Rozière . His idea was to use the hydrogen section for constant lift and to navigate vertically by heating and allowing to cool the hot air section, in order to catch the most favourable wind at whatever altitude it was blowing. The balloon envelope was made of goldbeaters skin . Shortly after the flight began, de Rozier
390-509: A craft. In an essay titled Sul volo ( On flight ), he describes a flying machine called "the bird" which he built from starched linen, leather joints, and raw silk thongs. In the Codex Atlanticus , he wrote, "Tomorrow morning, on the second day of January, 1496, I will make the thong and the attempt." Some of Leonardo's other designs, such as the four-person aerial screw , similar to a helicopter, have severe flaws. He drew and wrote about
468-616: A design for an ornithopter around 1490. Leonardo's work remained unknown until 1797, and so had no influence on developments over the next three hundred years. In 1496, a man named Seccio broke both arms in Nuremberg while attempting flight. In 1507, John Damian strapped on wings covered with chicken feathers and jumped from the walls of Stirling Castle in Scotland, breaking his thigh; he later blamed it on not using eagle feathers. The earliest report of an attempted jet flight dates back to
546-686: A gastight balloon material. On hearing of the Montgolfier Brothers' invitation, the French Academy member Jacques Charles offered a similar demonstration of a hydrogen balloon and this was accepted. Charles and two craftsmen, the Robert brothers, developed a gastight material of rubberised silk and set to work. 1783 was a watershed year for ballooning. Between 4 June and 1 December five separate French balloons achieved important aviation firsts: The Montgolfier designs had several shortcomings, not least
624-457: A later design in 1866 around New York City and as far as Oyster Bay, New York. His technique of gliding under gravity works by changing the lift to provide propulsive force as the airship alternately rises and sinks, and so does not need a powerplant. A further advance was made on 9 August 1884, when the first fully controllable free flight was made by Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs in
702-540: A man-lifting kite in 1868. Later, in 1880, Biot demonstrated to the French Society for Aerial Navigation a kite based on an open-ended cone, similar to a windsock but attached to a flat surface. The man-carrying kite was developed a stage further in 1894 by Captain Baden Baden-Powell , brother of Lord Baden-Powell , who strung a chain of hexagonal kites on a single line. A significant development came in 1893 when
780-559: A part of South Asia, is usually not included in the Indian subcontinent. Maldives, an island country consisting of a small archipelago southwest of the peninsula, while largely considered a part of the Indian subcontinent, sometimes is mentioned by sources, including the International Monetary Fund , as a group of islands away from the Indian subcontinent in a south-western direction. The population of Indian subcontinent
858-536: A possible rotor in aircraft: "Some have made flying cars [feiche 飛車] with wood from the inner part of the jujube tree , using ox-leather (straps) fastened to returning blades so as to set the machine in motion." The similar "moulinet à noix" (rotor on a nut), as well as string-pull toys with four blades, appeared in Europe in the 14th century. From ancient times the Chinese have understood that hot air rises and have applied
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#1732851257679936-415: A river or a no man's land . The precise definition of an "Indian subcontinent" in a geopolitical context is somewhat contested as there is no globally accepted definition on which countries are a part of South Asia or the Indian subcontinent. Whether called the Indian subcontinent or South Asia, the definition of the geographical extent of this region varies. Afghanistan , despite often considered as
1014-588: A second, inner ballonet . On 19 September 1784, it completed the first flight of over 100 kilometres (62 mi), between Paris and Beuvry , despite the man-powered propulsive devices proving useless. In January the next year Jean Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries crossed the English Channel from Dover to the Bois de Felmores in a Charlière. But a similar attempt the other way ended in tragedy. To try to provide both endurance and controllability, de Rozier developed
1092-533: A ship's sail , it comprised a square of material stretched across a square frame and retained by ropes. The parachutist was suspended by ropes from each of the four corners. Louis-Sébastien Lenormand is considered the first human to make a witnessed descent with a parachute. On 26 December 1783, he jumped from the tower of the Montpellier observatory in France, in front of a crowd that included Joseph Montgolfier, using
1170-508: A split bamboo framework. The earliest known Chinese kites were flat (not bowed) and often rectangular. Later, tailless kites incorporated a stabilizing bowline. Designs often emulated flying insects, birds, and other beasts, both real and mythical. Some were fitted with strings and whistles to make musical sounds while flying. In 549 AD, a kite made of paper was used as a message for a rescue mission. Ancient and medieval Chinese sources list other uses of kites for measuring distances, testing
1248-458: A stabilizing tail). He eventually came to realise the impracticality of these and turned to controlled gliding flight, also sketching some designs powered by a spring. In 1488, Leonardo drew a hang glider design in which the inner parts of the wings are fixed, and some control surfaces are provided towards the tips (as in the gliding flight of birds). His drawings survive and are deemed flight-worthy in principle, but he himself never flew in such
1326-534: A start and was confident that the problem would be solved. He wrote: "It seems easier to talk of such a machine than to put it into actuality, for it requires greater force and less weight than exists in a human body. The science of mechanics might perhaps suggest a means, namely, a strong spiral spring. If these advantages and requisites are observed, perhaps in time to come some one might know how better to utilize our sketch and cause some addition to be made so as to accomplish that which we can only suggest". The Editor of
1404-598: Is certain that Gusmão was working on this principle at the public exhibition he gave before the Court on 8 August 1709, in the hall of the Casa da Índia in Lisbon , when he propelled a ball to the roof by combustion. He also demonstrated a small airship model before the Portuguese court, but never succeeded with a full-scale model. Both understanding and a power source were still lacking. This
1482-472: Is said to have used them to scare the enemy troops. There is evidence the Chinese also "solved the problem of aerial navigation" using balloons, hundreds of years before the 18th century. Eventually some investigators began to discover and define some of the basics of scientific aircraft design. Powered designs were either still driven by man-power or used a metal spring. In his 1250 book De mirabili potestate artis et naturae (Secrets of Art and Nature),
1560-874: The American Civil War by the Union Army Balloon Corps . In 1863, the young Ferdinand von Zeppelin , who was acting as a military observer with the Union Army of the Potomac , first flew as a balloon passenger in a balloon that had been in service with the Union army. Later that century, the British Army would make use of observation balloons during the Boer War . Work on developing a dirigible (steerable) balloon, nowadays called an airship , continued sporadically throughout
1638-576: The British Indian Ocean Territory which is geologically associated with the subcontinent. Geologically, the subcontinent originates from Insular India , an isolated landmass that rifted from the supercontinent of Gondwana during the Cretaceous and merged with the landmass of Eurasia nearly 55 million years ago, forming the Himalayas. It is one of the most populated regions in
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#17328512576791716-668: The Cretaceous . Insular India subsequently drifted northeastwards, colliding with the Eurasian Plate nearly 55 million years ago, during the Eocene , forming the Indian subcontinent. The zone where the Eurasian and Indian subcontinent plates meet remains geologically active, prone to major earthquakes. Physiographically , it is a peninsular region in South Asia delineated by the Himalayas in
1794-520: The Ottoman Empire . In 1633, the aviator Lagâri Hasan Çelebi reportedly used a cone-shaped rocket to make the first attempt at a jet flight. Francis Willughby 's suggestion, published in 1676, that human legs were more comparable to birds' wings in strength than arms, had occasional influence. On 15 May 1793, the Spanish inventor Diego Marín Aguilera jumped with his glider from the highest part of
1872-537: The Oxford English Dictionary , the term subcontinent signifies a "subdivision of a continent which has a distinct geographical, political, or cultural identity" and also a "large land mass somewhat smaller than a continent". Its use to signify the Indian subcontinent is evidenced from the early twentieth century when most of the territory was either part of the British Empire or allied with them. It
1950-505: The Partition of India , citizens of Pakistan (which became independent of British India in 1947) and Bangladesh (which became independent of Pakistan in 1971) often perceive the use of the Indian subcontinent as offensive and suspicious because of the dominant placement of India in the term. As such it is being increasingly less used in those countries. Meanwhile, many Indian analysts prefer to use
2028-574: The Polish King Władysław IV to his court in Warsaw , built a model aircraft with four fixed glider wings in 1647. Described as "four pairs of wings attached to an elaborate 'dragon'", it was said to have successfully lifted a cat in 1648 but not Burattini himself. He promised that "only the most minor injuries" would result from landing the craft. His "Dragon Volant" is considered "the most elaborate and sophisticated aeroplane to be built before
2106-553: The Portuguese court. In the mid-18th century the Montgolfier brothers began experimenting with parachutes and balloons in France. Their balloons were made of paper, and early experiments using steam as the lifting gas were short-lived due to its effect on the paper as it condensed. Mistaking smoke for a kind of steam, they began filling their balloons with hot smoky air which they called "electric smoke". Despite not fully understanding
2184-521: The spread of Buddhism out of the subcontinent into other parts of Asia. The Islamic expansion arrived into the subcontinent in two ways: through Afghanistan on land, and to the Indian coast through the maritime routes on the Arabian Sea. In terms of modern geopolitical boundaries, the subcontinent constitutes Bangladesh , Bhutan , India, Nepal , and Pakistan , besides, by convention, the island country of Sri Lanka and other nearby island nations of
2262-543: The 19th Century". Bartolomeu de Gusmão 's "Passarola" was a hollow, vaguely bird-shaped glider of similar concept but with two wings. In 1709, he presented a petition to King John V of Portugal , begging for support for his invention of an "airship", in which he expressed the greatest confidence. The public test of the machine, which was set for 24 June 1709, did not take place. According to contemporary reports, however, Gusmão appears to have made several less ambitious experiments with this machine, descending from eminences. It
2340-611: The 19th century. The first sustained powered, controlled flight in history is believed to have taken place on 24 September 1852 when Henri Giffard flew about 17 miles (27 km) in France from Paris to Trappes with the Giffard dirigible , a non-rigid airship filled with hydrogen and powered by a 3 horsepower (2.2 kW) steam engine driving a 3-bladed propeller. In 1863, Solomon Andrews flew his aereon design, an unpowered, controllable dirigible in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He flew
2418-498: The 1st century AD, Chinese Emperor Wang Mang recruited a specialist scout to be bound with bird feathers; he is claimed to have glided about 100 meters. In 559 AD, Yuan Huangtou is said to have landed safely from an enforced tower jump. The Andalusian scientist Abbas ibn Firnas (810–887 AD) reportedly made a glide in Córdoba, Spain , covering his body with vulture feathers and attaching two wings to his arms. The flight attempt
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2496-533: The 6 m/s (13 mph) speed record of the French airship La France by 3 m/s (7 mph). The Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont became famous by designing, building, and flying dirigibles . He built and flew the first fully practical dirigible capable of routine, controlled flight. With his dirigible No.6 he won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize on 19 October 1901 with a flight that took off from Saint-Cloud, rounded
2574-940: The Australian Lawrence Hargrave invented the box kite and some man-carrying experiments were carried out both in Australia and in the United States. On 27 December 1905, Neil MacDearmid was carried aloft in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Canada by a large box kite named the Frost King, designed by Alexander Graham Bell . Balloons were by then in use for both meteorology and military observation. Balloons can only be used in light winds, while kites can only be used in stronger winds. The American Samuel Franklin Cody , working in England, realised that
2652-619: The British Army. In his own time, he developed a manned "glider-kite" which was launched on a tether like a kite and then released to glide freely. In 1907, Cody next fitted an aircraft engine to a modified unmanned "power-kite", the precursor to his later aeroplanes, and flew it inside the Balloon Shed, along a wire suspended from poles, before the Prince and Princess of Wales. The British Army officially adopted his war kites for their Balloon Companies in 1908. Da Vinci's realisation that manpower alone
2730-525: The Eiffel Tower and returned to its starting point. By this point, the airship had been established as the first practicable form of air travel. Da Vinci's design for a pyramid-shaped parachute remained unpublished for centuries. The first published design was the Croatian Fausto Veranzio 's homo volans (flying man) which appeared in his book Machinae novae (New machines) in 1595. Based on
2808-466: The Englishman Roger Bacon predicted future designs for a balloon filled with an unspecified aether as well as a man-powered ornithopter , claiming to know someone who had invented the latter. Leonardo da Vinci studied bird flight for many years, analyzing it rationally and anticipating many principles of aerodynamics . He understood that "An object offers as much resistance to the air as
2886-505: The Indian Ocean, such as Maldives and the British Indian Ocean Territory . Unlike "South Asia", sometimes the expression "Indian subcontinent" may exclude the islands of Maldives and Sri Lanka. According to Pawan Budhwar, Arup Varma, and Manjusha Hirekhan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan constitute the Indian subcontinent. Budhwar, Varma, and Hirekhan also maintain that with Afghanistan and Maldives included
2964-773: The Indian Plate along with the Chagos–Laccadive Ridge , a submarine ridge that was generated by the northern drift of the Indian Plate over the Réunion hotspot during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic times. The Maldives archipelago rises from a basement of volcanic basalt outpourings from a depth of about 2000 m forming the central part of the ridge between Laccadives and the Great Chagos Bank . According to anthropologist Patrap C. Dutta, "the Indian subcontinent occupies
3042-597: The Royal Aeronautical Society journal wrote in 1910 that Swedenborg's design was "...the first rational proposal for a flying machine of the aeroplance [heavier-than-air] type..." Indian subcontinent The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia , mostly situated on the Indian Plate , projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas . Geographically, it spans
3120-786: The Western Fold Belt along the border (between the Sulaiman Range and the Chaman Fault) is the western boundary of the Indian Plate, where, along the Eastern Hindu Kush, lies the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. In the east, it is bounded by Patkai , Naga , Lushai and Chin hills. The Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea form the boundary of the Indian subcontinent in the south, south-east and south-west. Given
3198-425: The air does to the object", anticipating Isaac Newton 's third law of motion (published in 1687). From the last years of the 15th century onwards, Leonardo wrote about and sketched many designs for flying machines and mechanisms, including ornithopters, fixed-wing gliders, rotorcraft and parachutes. His early designs were man-powered types including rotorcraft and ornithopters (improving on Bacon's proposal by adding
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3276-472: The atmosphere. By the early 1900s, ballooning was a popular sport in Britain. These privately owned balloons usually used coal gas as the lifting gas. This has about half the lifting power of hydrogen, so the balloons had to be larger; however, coal gas was far more readily available, and the local gas works sometimes provided a special lightweight formula for ballooning events. Tethered balloons were used during
3354-499: The castle of Coruña del Conde , reaching a height of about 5 or 6 m, and gliding for about 360 metres. As late as 1811, Albrecht Berblinger constructed an ornithopter and jumped into the Danube at Ulm . The modern era of lighter-than-air flight began early in the 17th century with Galileo Galilei 's experiments in which he showed that air has weight. Around 1650, Cyrano de Bergerac wrote some fantasy novels in which he described
3432-415: The countries of Bangladesh , Bhutan , the British Indian Ocean Territory (United Kingdom), India , Maldives , Nepal , Pakistan , and Sri Lanka . Although the terms "Indian subcontinent" and "South Asia" are often used interchangeably to denote the region, the geopolitical term of South Asia frequently includes Afghanistan , which is not considered a part of the subcontinent, while excluding
3510-476: The difficulty of passage through the Himalayas, the sociocultural, religious and political interaction of the Indian subcontinent has largely been through the valleys of Afghanistan in its northwest, the valleys of Manipur in its east, and by maritime routes . More difficult but historically important interaction has also occurred through passages pioneered by the Tibetans . These routes and interactions have led to
3588-691: The earliest known is the Greek legend of Daedalus ; in Ovid 's version, Daedalus fastens feathers together with thread and wax to mimic the wings of a bird. Other ancient legends include the Indian Vimana flying palace or chariot, the biblical Ezekiel's Chariot , the Irish roth rámach built by blind druid Mug Ruith and Simon Magus , various stories about magic carpets , and the mythical British King Bladud , who conjured up flying wings. The Flying Throne of Kay Kāvus
3666-720: The east, the Iranian Plateau to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the south. Apart from Maritime Southeast Asia (the Malay Archipelago ), the maritime region of the subcontinent ( littoral South Asia ) is the only subregion of Asia that lies partly within the Southern Hemisphere : the British Indian Ocean Territory two of the 26 atolls of the Maldives lie entirely within the Southern Hemisphere. Historically,
3744-498: The first were Hautsch and Burattini (1648). Others included de Gusmão's "Passarola" (1709 on), Swedenborg (1716), Desforges (1772), Bauer (1764), Meerwein (1781), and Blanchard (1781) who would later have more success with balloons. Rotary-winged helicopters likewise appeared, notably from Lomonosov (1754) and Paucton. A few model gliders flew successfully although some claims are contested, but in any event no full-size craft succeeded. Italian inventor, Tito Livio Burattini , invited by
3822-562: The gods. By 1634, kites had reached the West, with an illustration of a diamond kite with a tail appearing in Bate's Mysteries of nature and art . Man-carrying kites are believed to have been used extensively in ancient China, for both civil and military purposes and sometimes enforced as a punishment. Stories of man-carrying kites also occur in Japan, following the introduction of the kite from China around
3900-562: The lifting containers to lose height. In practice de Terzi's spheres would have collapsed under air pressure, and further developments had to wait for more practicable lifting gases. The first documented balloon flight in Europe was of a model made by the Brazilian-born Portuguese priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão . On 8 August 1709, in Lisbon , he made a small hot-air balloon of paper with a fire burning beneath it, lifting it about 4 metres (13 ft) in front of king John V and
3978-453: The major landmass of South Asia." According to historian B. N. Mukherjee , "The subcontinent is an indivisible geographical entity." According to geographer Dudley Stamp , "There is perhaps no mainland part of the world better marked off by nature as a region or a 'realm' by itself than the Indian subcontinent." This natural physical landmass in South Asia is the dry-land portion of the Indian Plate , which has been relatively isolated from
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#17328512576794056-520: The manned design of Charles was essentially modern. As a result of these exploits, the hot air balloon became known as the Montgolfière type and the gas balloon the Charlière . The next balloon of Charles and the Robert brothers was a Charlière that followed Jean Baptiste Meusnier 's proposals for an elongated dirigible balloon, and was notable for having an outer envelope with the gas contained in
4134-404: The need for dry weather and a tendency for sparks from the fire to set light to the paper balloon. The manned design had a gallery around the base of the balloon rather than the hanging basket of the first, unmanned design, which brought the paper closer to the fire. On their free flight, De Rozier and d'Arlandes took buckets of water and sponges to douse these fires as they arose. On the other hand,
4212-641: The north, the Hindu Kush in the west, and the Arakanese in the east. It extends southward into the Indian Ocean with the Arabian Sea to the southwest and the Bay of Bengal to the southeast. Most of this region rests on the Indian Plate and is isolated from the rest of Asia by large mountain barriers. Laccadive Islands , Maldives and the Chagos Archipelago are three series of coral atolls , cays and Faroes on
4290-417: The outlook. The use of a rotor for vertical flight has existed since the 4th century AD in the form of the bamboo-copter , an ancient Chinese toy. The bamboo-copter is spun by rolling a stick attached to a rotor. The spinning creates lift, and the toy flies when released. The philosopher Ge Hong 's book, the Baopuzi (Master Who Embraces Simplicity), written around 317, describes the apocryphal use of
4368-590: The principle of ascent using a substance (dew) he supposed to be lighter than air, and descending by releasing a controlled amount of the substance. Francesco Lana de Terzi measured the pressure of air at sea level and in 1670 proposed the first scientifically credible lifting medium in the form of hollow metal spheres from which all the air had been pumped out. These would be lighter than the displaced air and able to lift an airship . His proposed methods of controlling height are still in use today: carrying ballast which may be dropped overboard to gain height, and venting
4446-399: The principle to a type of small hot air balloon called a sky lantern . A sky lantern consists of a paper balloon under or just inside which a small lamp is placed. Sky lanterns are traditionally launched for pleasure and during festivals. According to Joseph Needham , such lanterns were known in China from the 3rd century BC. Their military use is attributed to the general Zhuge Liang , who
4524-403: The principles at work, they made some successful launches and in December 1782 flew a 20 m (710 cu ft) balloon to a height of 300 m (980 ft). The French Académie des Sciences soon invited them to Paris to give a demonstration. Meanwhile, the discovery of hydrogen led Joseph Black to propose its use as a lifting gas in about 1780, though practical demonstration awaited
4602-420: The region is referred to as South Asia. The periphery of the subcontinent, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the island chains of Maldives, features large Muslim populations, while the heartland, including most of India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, are overwhelmingly Hindu or Buddhist. Since most of these countries are located on the Indian Plate, a continuous landmass , the borders between countries are often either
4680-423: The region surrounding and southeast of the Indus River was often simply referred to as "India" in many historical sources. Even today, historians use this term to denote the entire Indian subcontinent when discussing history up until the era of the British Raj. Over time, however, "India" evolved to refer to a distinct political entity that eventually became a nation-state (today the Republic of India). According to
4758-457: The rest of Eurasia. The Himalayas (from Brahmaputra River in the east to Indus River in the west), Karakoram (from Indus River in the east to Yarkand River in the west) and the Hindu Kush mountains (from Yarkand River westwards) form its northern boundary. In the west it is bounded by parts of the mountain ranges of Hindu Kush , Spīn Ghar (Safed Koh), Sulaiman Mountains , Kirthar Mountains , Brahui range, and Pab range among others, with
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#17328512576794836-407: The seventh century AD. It is said that at one time there was a Japanese law against man-carrying kites. In 1282, the European explorer Marco Polo described the Chinese techniques then current and commented on the hazards and cruelty involved. To foretell whether a ship should sail, a man would be strapped to a kite having a rectangular grid framework and the subsequent flight pattern used to divine
4914-503: The subcontinent around the world e.g. " Australia's tour of the subcontinent". The word is also sometimes used as an adjective in this context e.g. "subcontinental conditions". The Indian subcontinent was formerly part of Gondwana , a supercontinent formed during the late Neoproterozoic and early Paleozoic . Gondwana began to break up during the Mesozoic , with Insular India separating from Antarctica 130-120 million years ago and Madagascar around 90 million years ago, during
4992-430: The term because of the socio-cultural commonalities of the region. The region has also been called the "Asian subcontinent", the "South Asian subcontinent", as well as "India" or " Greater India " in the classical and pre-modern sense. The sport of cricket is notably popular in India , Pakistan , Sri Lanka , Nepal and Bangladesh . Within a cricket context, these countries are often referred to simply as
5070-454: The twelfth century, William of Malmesbury stated that the 11th-century Benedictine monk Eilmer of Malmesbury attached wings to his hands and feet and flew a short distance, but broke both legs while landing, also having neglected to make himself a tail. The kite was invented in China, possibly as far back as the 5th century BC by Mozi (also Mo Di) and Lu Ban (also Gongshu Ban). These leaf kites were constructed by stretching silk over
5148-437: The two types of craft between them allowed operation over a wide range of weather conditions. He developed Hargrave's basic design, adding additional lifting surfaces to create powerful man-lifting systems using multiple kites on a single line. Cody made many demonstrations of his system and would later sell four of his "war kite" systems to the Royal Navy. His kites also found use in carrying meteorological instruments aloft and he
5226-406: The usage of the term South Asia is becoming more widespread since it clearly distinguishes the region from East Asia. While South Asia , a more accurate term that reflects the region's contemporary political demarcations, is replacing the Indian subcontinent , a term closely linked to the region's colonial heritage, as a cover term, the latter is still widely used in typological studies. Since
5304-500: The wind, lifting men, signalling, and communication for military operations. After its introduction into India , the kite further evolved into the fighter kite . Traditionally these are small, unstable single line flat kites where line tension alone is used for control, and an abrasive line is used to cut down other kites. Kites also spread throughout Polynesia , as far as New Zealand . Anthropomorphic kites made from cloth and wood were used in religious ceremonies to send prayers to
5382-409: The world, holding roughly 20–25 percent of the global population. Geographically, the peninsular region in Southern Asia is located below the Third Pole , delineated by the Himalayas in the north, the Hindu Kush in the west, and the Indo-Burman Ranges in the east. The neighboring geographical regions around the subcontinent include the Tibetan Plateau to the north, the Indochinese Peninsula to
5460-470: Was a convenient term to refer to the region comprising both British India and the princely states . The term has been particularly common in the British Empire and its successors, while the term South Asia is the more common usage in Europe and North America. According to historians Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal , the Indian subcontinent has come to be known as South Asia "in more recent and neutral parlance". Indologist Ronald B. Inden argues that
5538-408: Was a legendary eagle-propelled craft built by the mythical Shah of Persia, Kay Kāvus, used for flying him all the way to China . According to Aulus Gellius , the Ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and strategist Archytas (428–347 BC) was reputed to have designed and built the first artificial, self-propelled flying device, a bird-shaped model propelled by a jet of what
5616-629: Was difficult to make them large enough to carry a commercial load. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin realised that a rigid outer frame would allow a much bigger airship. He founded the Zeppelin firm, whose rigid Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 (LZ 1) first flew from the Bodensee on the Swiss border on 2 July 1900. The flight lasted 18 minutes. The second and third flights, in October 1900 and on 24 October 1900 respectively, beat
5694-655: Was made a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. In 1905, Sapper Moreton of the British Army's balloon section was lifted 2,600 feet (790 m) by a kite at Aldershot under Cody's supervision. In 1906, Cody was appointed Chief Instructor in Kiting at the Army School of Ballooning in Aldershot. He soon also joined the newly established Army Balloon Factory at Farnborough and continued developing his war kites for
5772-464: Was not sufficient for sustained flight was rediscovered independently in the 17th century by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Robert Hooke . Hooke realised that some form of engine would be necessary and in 1655 made a spring-powered ornithopter model which was apparently able to fly. Attempts to design or construct a true flying machine began, typically comprising a gondola with a supporting canopy and spring- or man-powered flappers for propulsion. Among
5850-565: Was probably steam, said to have actually flown some 200 metres around 400 BC. According to Gellius, this machine, which its inventor called The Pigeon (Greek: Περιστέρα "Peristera"), was suspended on a wire or pivot for its "flight" and was powered by a "concealed aura or spirit". Eventually some tried to build flying devices, such as birdlike wings, and to fly by jumping off a tower, hill, or cliff. During this early period physical issues of lift, stability, and control were not understood, and most attempts ended in serious injury or death. In
5928-455: Was recognised by Emanuel Swedenborg in his " Sketch of a Machine for Flying in the Air " (1716). His flying machine consisted of a light frame covered with strong canvas and provided with two large oars or wings moving on a horizontal axis, arranged so that the upstroke met with no resistance while the downstroke provided lifting power. Swedenborg knew that the machine would not fly, but suggested it as
6006-428: Was reported by the 17th-century Algerian historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari , who linked it to a 9th-century poem by one of Muhammad I of Córdoba 's court poets. Al-Maqqari stated that Firnas flew some distance, before landing with some injuries, attributed to his lacking a tail (as birds use to land). The historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. concluded that ibn Firnas made the first successful flight in history. In
6084-406: Was seen to be venting hydrogen when it was ignited by a spark and the balloon went up in flames, killing those on board. The source of the spark is not known, but suggestions include static electricity or the brazier for the hot air section. Ballooning quickly became a major "rage" in Europe in the late 18th century, providing the first detailed understanding of the relationship between altitude and
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