Future of Engineering

I read about an Italian Olivier Vietti-Teppa's daring experiment to prove Lenardo da Vinci right. In order to prove that Da Vinci’s parachute design actually does work, Vietti-Teppa plunged 2000 feet on a parachute design made by Da Vinci over 500 years ago. How’s that for guts?

Got me thinking more on this, and about Da Vinci's actual design.

Which led me to the following BBC article. Looks like the Italian was not exactly the first to prove it, at least not the basic design that Da Vinci had put down. This is what the June 2000 BBC article has to say:"More than 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci sketched his design, a Briton has proved that the renaissance genius was indeed the inventor of the first working parachute.

Adrian Nicholas, a 38-year-old skydiver from London, fulfilled his life's ambition to prove the aerodynamics experts wrong when he used a parachute based on Da Vinci's design to float almost one and a half miles down from a hot air balloon. Ignoring warnings that it would never work, he built the 187lb contraption of wooden poles, canvas and ropes from a simple sketch that Da Vinci had scribbled in a notebook in 1485."

Interesting.

Now, whether it was the Londonder who proved it eight years back or whether it is the Italian who has proved it now, one thing is clear: Da Vinci was a genius who thought far ahead of his time

While we celebrate Da Vinci’s genius we also have to remember the contribution of the rest of the world to the aviation industry.

Contribution of China

The history of the parachute dates back to the 12^th century. At that time in China, during court ceremonies jumping stunts were performed with devices that resembled a parachute. The primitive technology closely resembled the umbrella which is by the way a Chinese invention.

Bizarre happenings reported in Chinese parachuting history

• ca90BC a Chinaman escaped a fire in a tower by jumping with two conical straw-hats as a drag or descent-delay parachute
• ca290BC-AD250 numerous instances of "man-lifting" kites bearing an observer aloft for military surveillance; as derived from the 5th Century BC Chinese invention of the kite, called a "flying sail" ... greatly anticipating the modern invention of the airfoil glider and ascending parachute
• ca550-577 Chinese archives document winged-flight experiments imitative of birds ca1000 Chinese officials experimented with parachute designs by compelling condemned prisoners to jump from towers and cliffs, according to archives translated by the French monk Vasson
• 1192 a Chinese acrobat stole some of the gold ornamentation off the roof of the Islamic minaret in Canton, and escaped by jumping with double umbrellas as a parachute

Contribution of Islam

The Western world celebrates Da Vinci, Lilienthal, and the Wright Brothers while discussing the inventions of the aviation industry. Little is said about Abbas Ibn Firnas (Armen Firnas) a 9th century Islamic Spain, who invented a primitive version of the parachute.

John H. Lienhard described it in The Engines of Our Ingenuity as follows:
"In 852, a new Caliph and a bizarre experiment: A daredevil named Armen Firman decided to fly off a tower in Cordova. He glided back to earth, using a huge winglike cloak to break his fall. He survived with minor injuries, and the young Ibn Firnas was there to see it."

“In 875, at an age of 65 years, Ibn Firnas made the first attempt at controlled flight when he invented a hang glider with artificial wings as flight control surfaces, and launched himself from the Mount of the Bride (Jabal al-'arus) in the Rusafa Area, near Córdoba. He apparently managed to fly for quite some time, by some accounts as long as ten minutes. This was the first attempt at controlled flight, as he was able to alter his altitude and change his direction in order to return to where he flew from. The flight was largely successful, and was widely observed by a crowd that he had invited. However, after successfully returning to his starting point, the landing was bad and he eventually crashed to the ground. He injured his back, and left critics saying he hadn't taken proper account of the way birds pull up into a stall, and land on their tails. He'd provided neither a tail, nor means for such a maneuver, and he later said that the landing could have been improved by providing a tail apparatus.”

Source Wikipedia

These inventions simply prove that Human beings the masters of the universe were not contented in admiring the flight of the birds. They wanted to explore the skies above. And history shows that men and women separated by space and time embarked on a grand mission that might have appeared quite silly to the uninspired minds.

Labels: Physics, Sciences