The Rise of the Flying Machine. Hugo Byttebier

a machine using air currents, but here reality has proved him to be mistaken.

      But an even greater complication, when proposing to ride the winds, was that air as a supporting medium is never as steady as a ground track and that steering and balancing such a flying machine would call for a great amount of skill on the part of the pilot and very sophisticated means for controlling the machine itself because it had also been observed that soaring birds appeared to fly with immobile wings but that the wingtips and the tail were continually flexing from one position to another.

      De Louvrié, having described the movements of soaring birds, had to admit that it was very like a tightrope walker, and it would need a great deal of acrobatic ability to achieve bird-like soaring, and this was indeed to prove the insurmountable obstacle to flying all those unstable, manually balanced machines of this new school of flight.

      D’Esterno was fully aware of the need for a great deal of control and, as an annex to his booklet, he added drawings of a possible soaring machine weighing 330 lbs with a wing surface of 215 sq ft. Means for obtaining stability by fixed surfaces, either horizontal or vertical, were conspicuously absent, but movable surfaces were shown in profusion. The wings were stated to move up and down, to slide forward and backward and they also had to be warped for diagonal (turning) movements. This was the first appearance of a provision for wing-warping in aviation history.

      A further complication was that the wings were hinged at both sides of the body and that each wing was supposed to adopt all the controlling movements independently from the wing on the other side. A tail was also added, and this was supposed to be able to effect the same movements, including twisting, that were attributed to the wings. Added to this, the pilot was seated but was supposed to be able to move his body around for a yet finer adjustment of balance, so it would appear that steering such a machine was certainly not a feat within the ability of any normal mortal endowed with only two hands and two feet.

      D’Esterno also patented his machine but neither the essay nor the patent gave any clue as to how all the different movement of the wings and the tail had to be worked and in his patent he provided “no more than a set of drums elaborately interconnected by ropes”, as Magoun and Hodgins described it in their comprehensive A History of Aircraft (p. 203), first published in 1931.

      D’Esterno never built his machine and we do not know how many would-be birdmen were inspired by him, but we do know that one soaring machine was actually built around 1867 by Joseph Le Bris, a sailor and sea-captain who was inspired by the albatross. The records show that Le Bris really designed a flapping-wing model in 1857 and later a helicopter project but they were both unsuccessful. It seems likely that Le Bris was inspired by d’Esterno’s pamphlet to build a machine like the one d’Esterno had proposed in 1864. The similarity lay in the fact that curved wings of an identical 215 sq ft surface were used and that the tail could affect movements like those in d’Esterno’s project. According to his biographer, Le Bris was able to effect all the complicated steering movements by standing upright, his hands on the different levers and cords that moved the wings and his feet on a pedal that worked the tail.

      It has been stated that Le Bris really did fly his contraption and that he was able to soar upwards after taking off from a cart when the horse had been urged to full speed. The story further relates that Le Bris was just preparing for an extended soaring flight when he became aware of cries of anguish from below and saw that the driver of the cart had become entangled in the rope. The driver was also flying, even if much against his will. This doubling of useful load did not apparently affect the flying characteristics of Le Bris’ untried and unpowered soaring machine, which is enough to arouse our admiration. But when the tale continues by stating that Le Bris was able to deposit the unlucky cart-driver gently on earth, and afterwards to land unhurt himself, our admiration turns into amazement and, by using a normal amount of critical judgement, ends in disbelief because all this sounds fanciful in the extreme.

When we then learn that nobody in 1867 (let alone in 1856 as has been stated) ever mentioned Le Bris’ flight and that it was made known for the first time in 1878 by de La Landelle as a part of a novel with the striking but unaeronautical title of Les Grandes Amours, we are inexorably led to the conclusion that Le Bris’ flight of 1867 was a figment of the novelist’s imagination.3

      A photograph taken in 1867 of Le Bris’ soaring glider (complete with cart) was exhibited by de La Landelle in July 1883 at the Aeronautical Exhibition of the Trocadéro in Paris. It was one of the big attractions at this Exhibition and has since been published several times in many aviation history books. One interesting consequence was that d’Esterno, who was by then an old man, was urged during that year to use some of his money to build the craft he had designed in 1864. He seems to have accepted the challenge, and arrangements were made with Claude Jobert, a mechanic who had built a rubber-band powered ornithopter prototype in 1871, and had himself proposed a model for an experimental construction along these lines in 1882, but d’Esterno died soon afterwards and the matter was dropped.

      

      3. In a later book, de La Landelle explained that he had received the information from Le Bris’s neighbours, which does not make the story more credible.

       L. P. Mouillard

      A few months after Pénaud had sent his resignation to the Société Française de Navigation Aérienne, they received a letter from Louis Pierre Mouillard who explained that in the flight of a flapping bird its tail was of no use. This was a rather unusual statement and Mouillard ended his letter by stating: “If I were rich, I would like to solve the aerial problem in three years.”

      Mouillard had become a fanatical devotee of soaring flight as achieved by the big birds of prey, which he had studied first in Algeria and later in Egypt, where he worked in Cairo. During his stay in these subtropical countries he had assigned himself the formidable task of analysing, measuring and describing all the birds he could lay his hands on and had finally come to the same conclusion as d’Esterno, that man would be able to fly with the power of the wind.

      In 1881, Mouillard published a remarkable book with the suggestive title of L’Empire de l’air, that caused quite a stir because his belief in the possibility of soaring flight was strongly expressed: “Ascension is the result of the skilful use of the power of the wind and no other force is required.”

      Hureau de Villeneuve wrote a long appraisal of Mouillard’s book in the October 1881 issue of L’Aéronaute, analysing the concept of soaring flight which had baffled so many researchers. In his review he rejected Pénaud’s theories that explained soaring flight by “so-called” rising currents which Pénaud “supposed” to exist in the atmosphere.

      Like Mouillard, Hureau de Villeneuve found Pénaud’s interpretation unacceptable and he gave two reasons for his inability to agree with Pénaud. The first was that, if these thermals existed, all objects — not only birds — would go up, and the second was that if these rising currents really existed, birds would presumably be able to soar but would not be able to come down again when they wanted to.

      Continuing his analysis of Mouillard’s book, Hureau de Villeneuve stated that a soaring bird was nothing but a kite in which the line was replaced by a “continuous displacement of the centre of gravity” which was the result of “a great instinctive skill on the part of those birds”.

      These premises were nonsensical and, coming as they did from the president of the French aeronautical society, they may give us an inkling of why Pénaud at times had great difficulty in keeping an even temper when discussing aeronautics with his colleagues at the society meetings.

      It is difficult to assess the real importance of Mouillard’s ideas. His book was very well received on publication, and he certainly inspired several pioneers who worked during the last decade of the nineteenth century. His influence extended to the United States just at the crucial moment when human flight was nearing its realization.

      But in the light