Bo was lying back in the grass enjoying the warmth of the sunshine after a long cold winter, daydreaming about catching supper when his attention was caught by a lone eagle floating around on invisible currents of air.
“Aah!” he thought in envy. “If only I could fly around like that I would know exactly where to hunt supper instead of having to spend hours and hours tracking something edible across the endless plains while having to keep looking over my shoulder for something like a sabre-toothed tiger tracking me!”
Sucking the last bit of marrow out off a chunk of hairy mammoth bone, Bo concentrated on the eagle a little longer and then, with a wild shout, heaved himself up, brushed his matted hair away from his eyes, squinted into the distance then took off running as fast as his hairy legs would go — flapping his long arms up and down in the hope that he would, if he tried hard enough, be able to fly like the eagle! And, just for a moment, he thought he’d done it as suddenly there was air, not ground, beneath his feet which is when he realised that he’d run straight off a short, sharp, drop!
Luckily for Bo, he landed without hurting anything other than his pride, as two other hunters witnessed his incredible performance and would, no doubt, rush straight back to tell everyone else in his little tribe what they had seen. Not to be put off, Bo next tried fastening feathers all over his animal hide clothes and even in his hair and beard, doing this miles away from their shared cave so that no one would see, of course, as he didn’t want everyone laughing at him again.
He’d forgotten about the eagle though; it watched this strange human creature flapping around in frenzy on the ground and then, to its utter astonishment, watched it jump off a really high cliff, flap its feather covered arms two or three times and then fall, straight down on to the rocks with a horrifying splat!
‘A convenient dinner,’ thought the eagle hoping that humans would continue this new sport thus saving him hunting time in the process.This sad event took place thousands and thousands of years ago when human beings were learning how to make the best of life in the world as they knew it and Bo really was ahead of the times when it came to dreaming up inventions. Bo and his tribe inhabited what later became Eastern Europe and, over the next few thousand years, they slowly but surely migrated eastwards until, in around 400BC — one of Bo’s descendants — a young man called Bi, glued together some pieces of paper, fastened them to a wooden frame, tied a piece of string to the contraption and thus invented what is still known as a kite.
Bi, by the way, lived in ancient China where colourful kites of all descriptions soon became part and parcel of the scene although, much to Bi’s disappointment, he didn’t manage to make one strong enough to carry a man up into the air which, like Bo, is what he had hoped to achieve.
Other descendants of Bo, scattered all over the world by now, repeatedly made wings out of feathers, wood and cloth and other odd items in their countless attempts to fly like the eagle. But as human arm muscles are much weaker than bird wing muscles, none of them manage more than a hop or a skip and many of them, sadly to say, emulating Bo by going splat!
Mankind’s fascination with flight didn’t diminish in the slightest and, if anything, grew stronger than ever, eventually driving a relatively modern day descendant of Bo, an Italian genius called Leonardo da Vinci — another guy way ahead of his time just like Bo — to sit down and design, amongst other things, the ‘Ornithopter’ back in the year of 1485. This amazing flying machine, on which today’s helicopters are based, didn’t actually get off the drawing board but the intention was obviously there and, if Leonardo da Vinci had really got his act together and successfully built and flown the Ornithopter at that time, history would have been very different indeed!
Three hundred years down the line, in 1783, something did finally get in the air: two French brothers, Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, direct descendants of Bi’s grandmother’s sister’s brother’s first cousin twice removed known, for the record, as Ba. They invented the very first hot air balloon made from Chinese silk with a passenger basket slung underneath. On its maiden flight it rose to 6,000ft in the air and flew for approximately one mile with its live passengers, a sheep, a rooster and a duck, wondering what on earth was going on!
Having proven that their idea worked, the brothers soon began flying people around which really encouraged yet another distant descendant of Bo who, like the brothers, was quite unaware of his bloodline, to go one better. George Cayley this man was called, designed a number of gliders between 1799 and the 1850s and a little boy, name unknown but definitely one of the tribe, had the dubious pleasure of being the very first person to actually ‘glide’.
The first long distance glider capable of carrying a human passenger was designed and flown by a German engineer, relationship to Bo not known, called Otto Lilienthal in 1891. And he personally flew over 2500 times before being killed in an aviation accident. He did, however, write a major book on aerodynamics, published in 1889 and on which the Wright Brothers based their own designs.
The Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, American descendants of Bo, are credited with being the very first people to actually fly. Beginning with one of Bi’s kites, they studied every conceivable theory of flight, including the need for an engine to keep them in the air, eventually coming up with ‘The Flyer’, an aeroplane which lifted off from flat ground to the north of a place called Big Kill Devil Hill, a name Bo would have appreciated, at 10: 35am December 17th, 1903, with Orville at the controls.
Since that time, countless varieties of flying machines have taken to the air, transporting people and goods all over the world and even, once rockets arrived on the scene, taking man to the moon and beyond. Bo would really have been delighted by the following which is all he really wanted. There are a wide variety of hang-gliders and propulsion backpacks which enable just a single person to soar like an eagle and even to hunt down supper if that is their intent!
