Timeline of aviation - pre-18th century

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This is a timeline of aviation - pre-18th Century

pre-10th century aviation

• c. 750 BC
  • emergence of the legend of Daedalus and Icarus.
• c. 600 - 400 BC
  • the Chinese started to use kites.
• c. 400 BC
  • the often-described pigeon of the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum could have been a kite.
• c. 220 BC
  • records indicate that the Chinese used kites as rangefinders.
• c. 875
  • Abbas Ibn Firnas flies a glider built of wood and feathers outside of Córdoba, Spain.

10th - 16th century aviation

• c. 1000
  • The glider kite is presumed to have gained currency around the Pacific. It was probably manned and used for military, religious and ceremonial reasons.
• c. 1010
  • Eilmer of Malmesbury builds a wooden glider and, launching from a bell tower, flies 200 metres.
• 1241
  • The Mongolian army uses lighted kites in the battle of Legnica.
• c. 1250
  • Roger Bacon writes the first known technical description of flight, describing an ornithopter design in his book Secrets of Art and Nature.
• 1282
  • Marco Polo reports on manned and ritual kite ascents.
• 1486 - 1513
  • Leonardo da Vinci designs an ornithopter with control surfaces. He envisions and sketches flying machines such as helicopters and parachutes, and notes studies of airflows and streamlined shapes.
• 1496
  • The Italian Mathematician Giambattista Danti is supposed to have flown from a tower.
• c. 1500
  • Hironymus Bosch shows in his triptych The temptation of the holy Antonius, among other things, two fighting airships above a burning town.
• 1558
  • Giambattista della Porta publishes a theory and a construction manual for a kite.

17th century aviation

• 1638
  • John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, suggests some ideas to future would-be pilots in his book The Discovery of a World in the Moon.
• 1644
  • Italian physicist Evangelista Toricelli manages to demonstrate atmospheric pressure, and also produces a vacuum.
• 1654
  • Physicist and mayor of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke measures the weight of air and demonstrates his famous Magdeburger Halbkugeln (hemispheres of Magdeburg).Sixteen horses are unable to pull apart two completely airless hemispheres which stick to each other only because of the external air pressure.
• 1670
  • Jesuit Francesco Lana de Terzi describes in his treatise Prodomo a vacuum-airship-project, considered the first realistic, technical plan for an airship. However, de Terzi wrote: God will never allow that such a machine be built…because everybody realises that no city would be safe from raids…
• 1678
  • Supposed flight of French locksmith Jacob Besnier with a flapping wing machine
• 1680
  • Italian physicist Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, the father of biomechanics, showed in his treatise On the movements of animals that the flapping of wings with the muscle power of the human arm can not be successful.
• 1687
  • Isaac Newton (1642-1727) published the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, basics of classical physics. In book II he presented the theoretical derivation of the essence of the drag equation.