Scientists in School Teacher Resource Package: Air and Flight
Air and Flight It’s a bird, it’s a plane…what is that in the air and, more importantly, how did it get there? For thousands of years, humans have looked into the sky and wondered how the objects they saw flying in the sky stayed aloft. Flight takes many forms, from seeds drifting in the wind, birds soaring on warm air thermals, to rockets blasting through the atmosphere. Nature perfected flight and, for thousands of years, humans tried to copy it but the feat proved to be quite elusive and became almost magical. The Greeks created Icarus, who flew on wings of wax. Russian and Arabian folk tales told of flying carpets. Eventually however, humans found that the mechanics of flight came down to the relationship between gravity, lift, thrust and drag, and not long after, humans were flying to the moon. Background Information Humans have dreamed about flying for thousands of years. In the mid-15th century, an anonymous manuscript was found that depicted a design for a parachute. Around 1485, Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for an ornithopter, an aircraft that flies by flapping wings. However his design was heavy and no one was strong enough to actually flap the wings. Hot air balloons are classified as “lighter-than-air” aircrafts, and were first introduced to the world in 1783. Almost 70 years later, Henri Giffard, a French engineer, created the first powered aircraft: a steam engine powered airship or dirigible (balloon filled with hydrogen). Airships were the first aircraft to enable controlled, powered flight, and were widely used before the 1940s.
[Show full text]