1. A Very Brief History of Flight
Fantastic
Flyers
Today we’re going to talk about some of the first flying things through the present day rockets. First of all, what do you think was the first flying thing on earth? Before pterodactyls….. Before birds…….
A Very Brief History of Flight

2. BUGS. Yes, bugs were the first things to fly on Earth
BUGS! Yes, bugs were the first things to fly on Earth. Winged insects were soaring in the sky long before there were even pterodactyls. Bugs were around about 400 million years ago. While dinosaurs would become extinct, bugs remained and still fly around today. What is another type of flying creature that you probably see every day?

3. BIRDS!
Birds have been around for about 200 million years. So how do birds fly? That’s right - they flap their wings. Birds have very strong muscles in their chests to flap their wings. In fact, nearly 25 percent of a bird’s body mass is for their wing muscles. Birds need this much strength so that they can flap and pump their wings very fast in order to fly. Birds also have hollow bones and very fast heartbeats.
Birds have played a major role throughout human history in inspiring people to fly. People have tried to imitate the way that birds fly and built large bird-like wings.

4. Kites were invented about 2000 years ago in China and they work because of the power of the wind. A kite has to fly at an angle so the wind hits it and keeps it up in the air. The fancy name for this is ANGLE OF ATTACK.
Kites had been one of the main forms of flying gadgets pretty much until the 1700s when two French brothers invented a whole new flying machine.
In the 1780s, two brothers, Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier were sitting in their office in the paper factory they owned. They Montgolfier brothers had lots of money and a lot of paper and major curiosity. So one day they noticed that when paper falls into fire, sometimes bits of paper would float up and get some lift. They were trying to figure out why and decided it was the smoke from the fire that was lifting these bits of paper into the air. Smoke rises and therefore must be carrying the paper with it.
So they began to fashion little bags out of paper and put them over the fire, open ends downward to see what would happen. Not surprisingly, the bags floated into the air and rose to the ceiling. So they kept making bigger and bigger bags and continued to have success. What do you think they invented?

5. Maybe you have heard the story of Icarus and Daedalus - it is a famous Greek myth about Icarus and his father Daedalus who had been imprisoned by the king of the Island of Crete. To escape, Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and his son. They attached the wings to their backs and arms and flapped the wings. The wings were made of feathers held together with wax and they were very fragile.
Daedalus warned Icarus to not fly too close to the sun, as it could melt the wax that held his wings together. But Icarus did not listen to his father. Icarus flew too closeto the sun, and melted the wax. His wings fell apart and he plummeted into the sea.
Although Icarus and Daedalus are only a myth, real people were thinking about how to fly like birds a long time ago. Has anyone heard of Leonardo DaVinci? What do you know about him?

6. He was a famous Italian painter who lived in the late 1400s - the Renaissance. He also liked to invent things, and he designed several flying machines. He drew designs for parachutes and helicopters and one of these.

7. …..an ornithopter. Like Daedalus, DaVinci based his flapping wing aircraft on the flight of birds. But he also realized that humans and birds are very different. How do people get around? We don’t have wings, so we walk around. So where are our strongest muscles? In our legs. So DaVinci designed this machine to use the movement of legs. You would lie with your stomach on this board and make the giant wings flap like a bird’s by pushing on the bar with your legs.
DaVinci never actually built this machine, and it’s just as well, because human muscle power alone could not have propelled the aircraft through the air.
So what do you suppose was one of the first flying things that people invented? I’ll bet you’ve flown one on a windy day. KITES!

8. HOT AIR BALLOONS!
Imagine this. They built a huge balloon made of four panels- one for the dome and three for the sides and held together by sewn seams and approximately 1800 buttons. The paper the Montgolfiers used was different and stronger than the paper we have today. Then paper was made of cotton and linen fibers, often made literally of rags. In fact, it was called rag paper.
Because the Montgolfiers wanted to make sure their balloon worked perfectly for their demonstration in front of the king, and because they thought the balloon rose because of the smoke, they decided to make a huge fire and burn as many things as they could think of the make black, stinky smoke. They burned wool, stray, rotting meat, and dirty socks! They also put passengers into their incredible flying machine. Apparently their father wouldn’t allow the brothers to fly in the balloon yet, so they had to find someone else. A sheep, a duck, and a rooster.
While they may have been right about the balloons ability to fly, the Montgolfiers were way off the mark in their explanation of why. Actually, the reason the bags became airborne was because of hot air.

9. Everything is made of molecules - you, the floor, air, water, everything. Molecules normally just hang out moving around a little. When molecules are cold, they slow way down. When they are heated, they start to move faster until they are moving around like crazy. (If possible, demonstrate with a hot air balloon).

10. When the balloon is filled with air that we heat up, the molecules inside the balloon start to move around very quicky and begin to bounce into one another and the walls of the balloon. As they hit each other, molecules are knocked out of the balloon, making it lighter than the colder air outside the balloon and thus causing the bag to rise. Now you know more about hot air balloons than the two brothers who invented them.
Balloons can be dangerous. What if something terrible would have happened on that first flight? The duck could fly. Maybe the rooster could fly. But the sheep couldn’t have flown at all. What could we give the sheep to protect it? A PARACHUTE!

11. When a parachute drops with a passenger, it makes a big bowl full of air. The molecules of air strike its surface, causing air resistance. Parachutes work because of drag. Drag is when air pushes against an object and slows its forward movement.Have you ever stuck your hand out of a car window when it is moving very fast? Your arm gets pushed back. That’s drag. A larger surface creates more drag.
Although by the 1800s, there were quite a few ways to fly (kites, hot air balloons, parachutes), people still wanted to fly like birds. Adventurous aviators soon realized that instead of flapping their wings, it would be better to use them to glide.
People had been trying to get gliders to fly for many years, but most designers met with little success. That is until they started looking more closely at soaring birds. Bigger birds with bigger wings soar or glide for long periods of time. The designers started to give their gliders curved, bird like wings that don’t flap, but are fixed. This seemed to do the trick.

12. A man named Daniel Bernoulli developed a theory that shows that fast moving air has less pressure than slow moving air. Picture air molecules as a family. If the molecules get separated, they want to catch up with the rest of the family on the other side of the obstacle. Then molecules going over the curved part of the wing must travelo farther than those going under the wing. So who has to travel faster in order to meet at the back of the wing? Those going over the wing, because they have farther to go.
100 years ago their were two brothers who knew about this effect, and thought it might be a good idea to think of a way to keep air moving over a glider’s wings wso that the craft could fly longer. Do you know who these brothers were? Have any of you heard of Orville and Wilbur Wright?
The air on the bottom can take its time, pushing up while it travels under the wing, but the air on the top is in a hurry? It doesn’t have time to push down. Sol we have the slow moving air on the bottom pushing up, while the air on top is rushing by, not pushing back. What do you think happens to the wing? Its pushed up. We call this LIFT. (Can demonstrate with hair dryer and ping pong ball)

13. One of the most famous of all glider designers was a fellow named Otto Lilienthal. He was a very eccentric, creative fellow who built all sorts of gliders. He even built his very oiwn hill that he would run down and launch himself from. He made over 2,000 glider flights, but perished during his last attempt. His gliders were kind of like our hang gliders today.
Gliders are made of cloth and fiberglass or lightweight woods like balsa. They don’t have an engine. They have to depend on a first thrust of some kind and the wind currents. Their wings are flat on the bottom and curved on the top. There is a very good reason for this.

14. Orville and Wilbur were actually bicycle manufacturers
Orville and Wilbur were actually bicycle manufacturers. They are credited with building the first successful airplane in December, 1903 that flew in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
While Lilienthal relied on just the air as a power source, the Brothers put a motor on their plane. Before Orville and Wilbur, some inventors tried to put steam engines on their planes for power. This was not a good idea, because steam engines need to have fire to work. So you would have to fly your plane with an open fire by the cockpit, and steam engines are super heavy and completely weigh down the plane.
The Wright brothers were very inventive. They built a plane with curved wings and a homemade gas powered motor, and propellers to pull air over the wings constantly. The Wright Brothers were also able to control their airplane in all three directions - yaw, pitch, and roll. Apparently this was the right combination and the Wright Brothers went down in history as the Fathers of Modern Aviation, but as time went on, people wanted to be able to go farther and faster.
Let’s start with a simple propeller (use a whirligig from the kit to demo). If we take a propeller in the front of the plane and tip it up, what machine have we made?

15. Right. Helicopters have a propeller on the top. We call it a rotor
Right! Helicopters have a propeller on the top. We call it a rotor. Helicopters are not a new invention. The taketombo (which means bamboo dragonfly) has been around for nearly 2000 years in Japan. The propeller works like a wing, giving it lift.

16. A jet engine acts a lot like a propeller - or I should say a bunch of propellers. The engine pulls air into a small space and pushes it out the back to force the plane forward. It does this by using a bunch of propellers, so it ends up looking much like a fan. You saw how one propeller can lift. Imagine hundreds of propellers spinning very quickly! Jet engines are very powerful, and using them, planes can go much faster and farther. Jet engines provide lots of thrust. The more thrust you have, the shorter the wings need to be. What has short wings and a very strong engine? It can go all the way into space.

17. A ROCKET. Rockets have been around thousands of years
A ROCKET! Rockets have been around thousands of years. The first rockets were called “fire arrows”. They were simple arrows made of wood and launched with gunpowder, sort of like fireworks. They were used in China in times of war.
In present times, rockets go a lot farther and a lot faster. Newton’s Third Law of Motion explains how rockets work. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Basically that means that when we add gas into a small chamber until it is so full or the pressure is so great, it has to shoot out the other end.

18. When enough pressure fills the chamber, a rocket will launch
When enough pressure fills the chamber, a rocket will launch. This rocket took astronauts all the way to the moon.

19. You have heard of the four forces of flight
You have heard of the four forces of flight. It took lots of time, creativity and ingenuity to figure out how to overcome gravity and drag. A plane uses all four forces as it flies.

20. So, we have just covered the history of flight from the past 2000 years in a few minutes. From bugs to rockets, and everything in between. And think about it - people with knowledge as different as an artist, papermakers, and bicycle manufacturers all made discoveries and contributions that advanced the developments of aviation because of a dream and inspiration. So remember, don’t ever stop dreaming. We would not be where we are today if not for those people who contributed their talents and enthusiasm to the field of education.