The History of Flight


	The fifteenth-century Italian artist and inventor, Leonardo da Vinci, left over 5,000 pages of notes and drawings. You need a mirror to read Leonardo's notes--he wrote them reversed and from left to right! He was pretty busy coming up with ideas for all kinds of inventions way ahead of his time like the automobile, telescope, diving suit, alarm clock, and machine gun. We know from Leonardo's notes that he had a life-long fascination with flight. He analyzed the wing structure of birds and bats, sketched flights of birds, and designed flying machines. One of his designs, called an "ornithopter", had a wooden frame and two huge bat-like wings. The pilot lay down in the frame and pumped pedals to move the wings. Leonardo's assistant tested the pedals, but we don't think he ever got the machine off the ground.

	Leonardo also designed a helicopter and a parachute. The parachute was a huge pyramid-shaped piece of cloth. It supposedly worked when tried out from the top of a tower. Leonardo had a lot of great ideas, unfortunately most of them stayed buried in his notebooks.

Sir Thomas Sopwith learned to fly the hard way. In 1910 he bought a biplane and put it together by himself. Considering the state of aviation in those days, this was pretty ambitious. He had never flown a plane before, but that didn't stop him from getting in and going for a test flight. The result? He crashed and wrecked the plane.

Unhurt and still determined to fly, Sopwith ordered another plane. When it arrived, he put it together and practiced taxiing up and down the runway for a while. After lunch, he took off and did a bit of flying. By late afternoon, he qualified for his Pilot's Certificate! A bit later he took up his first passenger (brave person).

After only 10 hours of flight time, he set new British flight distance records. He also came second in the 1910 British Empire Michelin Cup for the longest distance flown by a British pilot in a British plane.

Sopwith went on to start an aviation company. He designed and built a biplane called the "Sopwith Camel". Wow, not bad for someone who learned to fly in a day!

The Aerial Experiment Association

Canadian aeronautical engineer Elizabeth "Elsie" MacGill was no stranger to "firsts". She was the first woman to get an electrical engineering degree in Canada, the first woman in North America to get a degree in aeronautical engineering, and the first woman aircraft designer in the world! She designed the Maple Leaf Trainer, and even though she never flew the plane herself, she went with the test pilots on all flights.

During World War II, she was chief engineer during production of a fighter plane called the Hawker Hurricane. MacGill also developed a winterized Hawker Hurricane complete with skis and de-icers.

In 1932 W.R. May and his monoplane helped the RCMP capture "the mad trapper" of Rat River. The trapper, Albert Johnson, killed a Mountie before fleeing into the Arctic. Loaded up with essentials like food, dynamite, tear-gas bombs, and ammunition, May flew after the Mounties who had been tracking Johnson for almost a month.

May was able to help the police locate Johnson by spotting his tracks from the air. The chase ended deep in the Yukon when a cornered Johnson opened fire on the Mounties. In the shoot-out that followed, Johnson was killed and one officer was wounded. May flew the injured Mountie to safety and then returned to bring out the others.



	Barnstormers were popular in the 1920s. Like a flying circus they flew from one town to the next amazing crowds with figure-eights, soaring, diving, wing-walking, parachuting, looping, and barrel-rolling. It was a hard, dangerous life that could easily end in death.

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