Airships past and present, together with chapters on the use of balloons in connection with meteorology, photography and the carrier pigeon . kind were best conducted over an expanse of water. Blanchard made several ascents in Vienna, and this encourageda watchmaker of Basle, named Degen, to construct a flyingmachine. With the help of some counterweights, he was able to FLYING MACHINES. 91 fly short distances in a large hall. He made some unsuccessfulexperiments in Paris, and was so roughly handled by the mobthat he afterwards preferred to do his work from the shelter of aballoon. All sorts of
Airships past and present, together with chapters on the use of balloons in connection with meteorology, photography and the carrier pigeon . kind were best conducted over an expanse of water. Blanchard made several ascents in Vienna, and this encourageda watchmaker of Basle, named Degen, to construct a flyingmachine. With the help of some counterweights, he was able to FLYING MACHINES. 91 fly short distances in a large hall. He made some unsuccessfulexperiments in Paris, and was so roughly handled by the mobthat he afterwards preferred to do his work from the shelter of aballoon. All sorts of proposals of the most complicated kind weremade in the course of time, but no success resulted. A man,named Buttenstedt, who was an ardent champion of wingedmachines, had curious ideas which he proposed to put intopractice. He studied the position of the wings during the flightof storks, and developed a wonderful theory relating to elastictension. He pointed out that when the bird is at rest, the tipsof the wings are pointed downwards and backwards ; when it isflying, they are pointed upwards and forwards. They reach the ^^n>o>.. Fig-. 47.—Diagrams illustrating Mareys theory with reference to theflight of a bird. forced position, natural to flight, as a result of the reaction dueto the upward pressure of the atmosphere on their bodies. Thisstate of tension puts the bird in a position to exercise a certainpressure, which drives it forwards. The onward movementceases when the pressure, exerted by reason of this tension, is nolonger sufficient to overcome the resistance of the air. Accordingto this view, the essential feature in the flight of a bird lies in thestate of tension, succeeded by a corresponding state of bird can only fly forward, because the positions of its wingsand of its centre of gravity do not admit of a backward Frenchman, named Marey, also made a special study of thesubject, and found that a bird does not drive the air backwards
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpubl, booksubjectaeronautics
