Wonderful Balloon Ascents; Or, The Conquest of the Skies

Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, inaugurated a more scientific era. In his “Treaty of the Admirable Power of Art and Nature,” he puts forth the idea that it is possible “to make flying-machines in which the man, being seated or suspended in the middle, might turn some winch or crank, which would put in motion a suit of wings made to strike the air like those of a bird.” In the same treatise he sketches a flying-machine, to which that of Blanchard, who lived in the eighteenth century, bears a certain resemblance. The monk, Roger Bacon, was worthy of entering the temple of fame before his great namesake the Lord Chancellor, who in the seventeenth century inaugurated the era of experimental science. Jean Baptiste Dante, a mathematician of Perugia, who lived in the latter part of the fifteenth century, constructed artificial wings, by means of which, when applied to thin bodies, men might raise themselves off the ground into the air. It is recorded that on many occasions he experimented with his wings on the Lake Thrasymenus. These experiments, however, had a sad end. At a fete, given for the celebration of the marriage of Bartholomew d’Alvani, Dante, who must not be confounded with the poet, whose flights were of quite another kind--offered to exhibit the wonder of his wings to the people of Perugia. He managed to raise himself to a great height, and flew above the square; but the iron with which he moved one of his wings having been bent, he fell upon the church of the Virgin, and broke his thigh.