| There was a thing about this yesterday on either All Things Considered
or Morning Edition. I missed the beginning, but apparently the
guy lived. I, too, don't think he got much distance (but then, neither
did Goddard on his first).
Burns
|
| According to tradition, a favorite method of execution in the late
middle ages involved tying the person to be executed to the front
of a cannon, then shooting the cannon. I imagine that a person
might fly a considerable distance under these circumstances.
Would that count?
John Sauter
|
| The two early (pre-1961) manned rocket flights I have read about
were one in China around 1500 A.D., when a man named Wang Hu (?)
strapped 47 rockets to a chair, then seated himself in it holding
two kites in either hand. At a given signal, attendants lighted
all the rockets. All the reports I have read about the results
of this launch have been varied, but it appears that his rocket
exploded and Wang Hu did go flying, albiet not as he planned and
not alive.
The other attempt took place in Italy in the 1790's. An Italian
fireworks rocket manufacturer advertised their rockets by launching
small animals attached to the rockets and parachuting them safely
to Earth (one might look upon this as early testing of organisms
in rocket flight). The family had even built rockets powerful enough
to launch a ram! The police ended these flights when a young boy
volunteered to be launched on one of the rockets, and they considered
such a flight too dangerous for a human.
As I said in .0, any more information on any other pre-Space
Age manned rocket flights, or more on the 1633 Turkish flight, would
be greatly appreciated.
Larry
|
| Newsgroups: sci.space
Path: decwrl!labrea!agate!ucbvax!FNAL.BITNET!HIGGINS
Subject: Turks in Space, circa 1633
Posted: 27 Jan 89 23:05:00 GMT
Organization: The Internet
Another recent issue of AEROSPACE HISTORIAN (Fall/September 1988)
had "Birdmen of the Middle East: Early Attempts at Human Flight," by
Gary Leiser, a USAF historian specializing in Islamic history. It's a
review of flight legends in the Arabic world, and among other things
it covers an incident not even whispered about in most Western books
on the history of rocketry, space travel, or science fiction.
Leiser quotes, and so will I, from a seventeenth-century account
by Evilya Chelebi. This supposedly happened around 1633 in Istanbul.
(Arabic speakers, please pardon my slaughter of the transliterations!)
"This Lagari Hasan had fabricated a seven-cylinder rocket using 50
okkas [about 64 kg] of gunpowder compound. When the Sultan was at
Saray Point, he got on the rocket and his apprentices lit the fuse of
the rocket. Saying, 'My Sultan, I have recommended you to God. I am
going to speak with the Prophet Jesus,' and, praising and glorifying
God, he made his ascent to the highest heaven... At the roof of the
heavens, the powder of the great rocket was exhausted and when it
descended toward the earth, he opened the eagle wings that he had in
his hands and landed in the water in front of the mansion of Sinan
Pasha. He swam from there and came naked to the Sultan. He kissed the
ground and began to joke, saying. 'My Sultan, the Prophet Jesus sends
you his regards.'"
Leiser doesn't believe a word of this, but he says, "Evilya's
account does show that the Turks had the ability to make large
rockets, that some Turks had contemplated human flight by means of
rockets as early as the seventeenth century, and that they may have
even experimented with such a flight." I find it interesting that this
account was written only a few years after Cyrano de Bergerac published
his own account of rocket-powered spaceflight, in his VOYAGE TO THE MOON.
This issue also carried an article about the Army Air Corps/USAF
attempts to control erupting volcanoes in Hawaii by bombing to divert
lava flow.
AIR POWER HISTORIAN (formerly AEROSPACE HISTORIAN)
$25/year (first two years for price of one for new members) from
Maj. Gen. Ramsay D. Potts
Publisher
Air Force Historical Foundation
Building 1413, Room 120
Stop 44
Andrews AFB, MD 20331
Bill Higgins
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
[email protected]
SPAN/HEPnet: 43011::HIGGINS
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