The Earliest European Hang Glider


BaalChatzaf

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The Earliest European hang glider was constructed and flow by a Monk, Eilmer of Marmsbury in the year 1010 c.e.

He did a tower jump with his device and flew about 180 meters before losing stability. The fall broke both his legs. He wanted to try again after he healed, but with a new hang glider with a tail. That might have given him a safe flight, but the head of the abbey forbade any more flights by the monks under his direction. So no more gliders were tried in Europe until modern times. Leonard da Vinci designed a hang glider but it was never constructed and tried out.

The first reasonably successful hang gliders were design by Lilienthal in Germany in the 1890s. He attempted to motorize his flyer but it failed and he was killed in the crash.

The Middle Ages were a bit more lively, intellectually speaking, than Ayn Rand would lead us to believe. Grosstesste and (Roger) Bacon were doing some good optical work and Bacon had figured out how rainbows worked. During the Middle Ages, water power was quite advanced. Overshot water wheels (actually large sets of water wheels) were used not only for grinding but for cleaning close (fuller work - the first washing machine?), turning lathes and such.and all this before the works of Aristotle were reimported from the Islamic Domains in the 1200s.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Bob:

This topic of flight is very interesting to me.

What possessed you to start this thread?

A...

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Bob:

This topic of flight is very interesting to me.

What possessed you to start this thread?

A...

Just setting some of the history of the dark and middle ages straight. The Dark Ages were not quite as Dark as the Mistress often implied

And if the Little Ice Age had not occurred (1350 - 1850) the Renaissance and the Enlightenment might have come 200 years earlier than it did.

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The history of mankind is conquest and rewriting history. Our present 20 somethings know nothing of early American history, WW II, the Viet Nam war and doubt the moon landing even happened. In a thousand years some future scientific culture might be quite surprised to find relics of earlier technologies on the moon and mars.

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The history of mankind is conquest and rewriting history. Our present 20 somethings know nothing of early American history, WW II, the Viet Nam war and doubt the moon landing even happened. In a thousand years some future scientific culture might be quite surprised to find relics of earlier technologies on the moon and mars.

The remains of a city or religious site was found in Turkey that goes back 12,000 ybp which is much, much earlier than conventional archeology estimates the rise of cities and large population centers. There is a lot of history lying just out of sight here on Earth waiting to be found. Maybe there was even something to the Atlantis myth which Plato published in The Timeous. Who knows?

As to finding human bases on the Moon, I think not. To get reaction propelled vehicles one needs at the very least the moral equivalent of Newton's three basic laws. We have not a letter or a syllable that the ancient Greeks, even the Ionians who invented science, had the foggiest notion of inertia. On the other hand a lot of ancient knowledge was lost, destroyed in the burnings of the libraries of Alexandria. We must work with what we can get our hands and eyes on. Early man just did not have mathematics sufficient to deal with motion properly, at least according to the evidence we have in hand now.

However there is an important lesson to learn: older does not mean more stupid. The greatest minds of the ancient civilizations were on a par, equal to in basic power and strength to the greatest minds in the modern world. It so happens that we are the heirs of work done over thousands of years, plus the work done in modern times which is extremely powerful due to modern technology for observing the world. We are the inheritors which makes us a bit richer, but does not make us smarter.

I have a hunch that if one took a leading ancient scientist, say Archimedes in his prime, on a time machine to the present, after the shock wore off and he could see calmly what we do today, he would catch on in an instant and start producing first rate work in the modern style. Surely a Roman engineer brought forth to modern times would be mighty impressed by our modern machines but he would not be bamboozled. A crane is a crane whether it is hand cranked or motor driven. A tunnel boring machine is just a lot of shovels and picks in action all at once. Our Roman engineer, Glutius Maximus would comprehend almost immediately.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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I meant relics from our age, earlier relative to a thousand years from know. Knowledge of our accomplishments in our lifetime lost to history, purposely erased, to be rediscovered far in the future.

"Our Roman engineer, Glutius Maximus would comprehend almost immediately." lol

Then he'd go out and buy a kettlebell to prevent 'glute amnesia'.

I really enjoy your writings Robert.

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