Flying Contraptions:
The Ornithopter
The idea of creating a machine that would imitate avian flight by flapping its wings may date back to the fourth-century B.C. Greek mathematician and politician Archytas of Tarentum, who by some accounts created a wooden bird connected to a pulley and counterweight that flew from a lower perch to a higher one when activated by a puff of air. But Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th- and early 16th-century artist and inventor, took the concept further, making scores of sketches of human-powered ornithopters. Leonardo’s designs put pilots in both prone and upright positions and called for them to flap their wings via pulleys employing both hands and feet. Though Leonardo believed that birds’ muscles were “incomparably more powerful” than those of humans relative to their size, he hoped that the idea of flying would inspire humans to somehow find the additional strength needed to get off the ground in an ornithopter. In that spirit, Leonardo wrote that “the great bird will make its first flight upon the great swan [Mount Ceceri, near Florence], filling the whole world with amazement, and all records with its fame, and it will bring eternal glory to the nest in which it was born.” It is not known whether Leonardo ever actually tried to build a working model. In recent years, inventors have returned to the concept. In 2006, retired University of Toronto aerospace professor James DeLaurier managed to get a manned jet engine-powered ornithopter to stay aloft for 14 seconds, before it was hit by a crosswind and nearly flipped over.
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