MECHANICAL FLIGHT Lectures delivered at the Imperial College of Science BY SIR G. GREENHILL UNIV. OF LONDON CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD 10 ORANGE STREET LEICESTER SQUARE W C UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA THE DYNAMICS OF MECHANICAL FLIGHT INTRODUCTION THE lectures were delivered in the Imperial College of Science and Technology in March 1910 and 1911, under the title "THE DYNAMICS OF MECHANICAL FLIGHT," and they are given here in the form in which they were delivered. The subject was then beginning to take hold of the public imagination, consequent on Blériot's feat of crossing the Channel on July 25, 1909, and the great strides made in the interval since in Mechanical Flight. The possibility of Human Flight has been an obsession of the imagination of Man from the earliest times recorded, for which an extensive article should be consulted in the Denkschrift der I.L.A. (der Internationalen Luftschiffahrt Austellung) Frankfurt, 1910, Band I, p. 118, Flugprobleme in Mythus Sage und Dichtung. In the Greek Mythology, Demeter rides in a car drawn by flying dragons. and Homer describes the flight of Hera in her chariot, Iliad V., 750; and then there is the legend of Icarus and his father Dædalus "who taught his son the office of a fowl, and yet for all his wings the fool was drowned"; and another legend of Archytas of Tarentum, "aerias tentasse domos" with his invention of a flying mechanical bird. Eschylus in his Prometheus has described the arrival in a flying chariot of the chorus of the Ocean Nymphs, followed by their father Oceanus on a four-legged bird, anxious to return in a single flight from the Scythian desert and the Caucasus to beyond the Pillars of Hercules and over the Atlantic. M.F. B |