You’ve heard the Greek legend of Daedalus and his son Icarus.  They are prisoners of the evil king Minos on the Isle of Crete.  Daedalus watches the birds swoop and soar, and says, “Minos holds the earth and water in subjection, but we’ll go through the air. “

Daedalus creates wings of feathers, wood and wax.  Father and son take them to a high cliff, leap into space, and fly.  Then Icarus — with the impatience of youth — becomes too brave, too godlike, and too sure of himself.  He flies too close to the sun and the wax in his wings melts.  He crashes to earth, and dies.    

Everyone knew this legend — if you try to fly, you fall, and if you fall, you die.  So why did men and women attempt to fly?  Why did we suddenly experience a flying renaissance in 1900 that led us to Kitty Hawk and two taciturn brothers, who taught us so well that now our greatest complaints about flying are  overcrowded airports, small seats and bad food?  

And they were driven.  Many of them didn’t have a home, a family, or even a friend other than their fellow lunatics.  Some started out poor, and most ended up bankrupt.  

This is not a story about the mechanics of flight — wingspans, ailerons, and altimeters — that you can find in a textbook.  This is a story about what lies in the human heart that makes us want to fly, to leave our appointed place in the universe — this comfortable cushion of earth — and take our fragile wings on an unending voyage.   It is about fanaticism and fatalism, man against gravity, the quest for the Holy Grail.  In simplest terms it is about what makes us heroes.  It is the story of “The Winged Gospel.”

These pioneers have two visions of what going up in the sky would mean.  One is that mankind will find heaven.  “The infinite highway of the air,” as Wilbur Wright describes it, “would bring riches to every man’s door.”

Or as aviation pioneer Octave Chanute says,  “Let us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine will make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relation with each other, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and good will.”  

Others are more cynical.  As early as 1670, Jesuit Monk Francesco Lana designs a flying machine. But then stops, saying, “God would surely never allow this, since it could create many disturbances.  Cities could be destroyed by missiles hurled from a vast height.”  He understands that to allow some men to ascend heaven would create a hell for the rest of us below.

Which vision will prevail?  

The dawn of flight begins when the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Entienne, papermakers in France, notice that the Bible is right.  The Book of Ecclesiastes says, “man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.”  As they poke around their fireplace, they too notice this.  Thinking that smoke is all you need, they build a huge balloon made of paper lined with linen, light the smokiest fire they can with old shoes, oily rags, wet wool and straw, and send it skyward in 1783.  

What happens next?  A man brave enough to go up in that balloon.  But who will it be?  King Louis XVI, who will soon lose his head in the French Revolution, says it’s too dangerous.  He will send up condemned convicts.

But a young science teacher, Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier, wants desperately to be the first.  “Why should two vile criminals be accorded the first glory of rising into the sky?” he asks.  So de Rozier and a nobleman make the first flight.  

Ben Franklin is in France negotiating the treaty to end the American Revolution when he sees this smoky blue giant crossing the sky.  “Of what use is that?” sniffs a French army officer with derision.  Franklin’s reply: “Of what use is a newborn babe?”

At the same time the Montgolfier brothers’ experiment with hot air, Professor Dr. Jacque Alexandre Charles takes evil-smelling “oil of vitriol” — today we call it sulfuric acid — and pours it over iron filings.  It releases the lightest, most buoyant substance known — hydrogen.  

Dr. Charles tucks the hydrogen into a lining made of varnished rubber — the same substance soon to be used in condoms — and it takes the balloon on a much longer flight than a hot air balloon, with no one stoking the furnace.

When the balloon lands in the village of Gonesse the peasants fear this creature from the sky as if it were a space monster of the 50s.  They shoot it, stab it with pitchforks and then tie it to a horse’s tail and gallop it about until the creature is in shreds.  In so doing they create a tradition that persists today.  Balloonists always take a bottle of champagne with them, so when they land they can bribe angry peasants with pitchforks.  

Now we can go up in the air, but we still have no way of going where we want.  We are blown by the wind.  And while hydrogen can lift us higher and take us further, the balloon just keeps going up . . . like Icarus.  A fire-driven hot air balloon can go as high or as low as you want by stoking the furnace underneath, but it burns out quickly.  So why not combine the two?

de Rozier puts them together in a dumbbell shaped contraption with the fire at the bottom and the hydrogen at the top and vows to fly across the English Channel.  It’s a good idea, but too far ahead of its time.  When hydrogen combines with oxygen it is the most explosive combination in the universe.  Even de Rozier knows it is reckless, but when King Louis XVI orders him to do it he can’t refuse.  Delay follows delay until July 15, 1785, when the breeze finally blows toward England.

de Rozier and his partner take off just five miles from the coast.  de Rozier’s English fiancée, Susan Dyer, watches as the strange mushroom heads out over the channel.  But as it rises to 5,000 feet, the hydrogen in the balloon expands.  The top of the balloon tightens because the hydrogen has to go somewhere.  So it spills out of the bottom — right into the fire.

A vagrant gust of wind pushes the balloon back toward France.  Suddenly fire leaps from the balloon’s crown.  Dyer and the crowd watch in horror as the flame-shrouded balloon plummets to the rocks on the shoreline.  de Rozier dies instantly and his fiancée collapses and dies shortly thereafter.  The French have a saying: “He who dies young knows only life’s roses, and leaves no orphans.”

There are other brave men and women.  Madame Sophie Blanchard is the wife of the famous aeronaut who first crossed the English Channel.  On his deathbed he says, “My poor dear, when I am dead I fear you will have no other resource than to throw yourself into the water.”  Instead, after he dies she takes up flying.   She is so petite that she can fly in a gondola that looks like a child’s cradle, and so fearless that she can sleep in the air.

Perhaps too fearless.  Like Americans, the French love their fireworks.  And what better way to show fireworks than with a balloon?  Madame Blanchard begins aerial shows with Bengal lights — rings of concentric fireworks that fit around the basket of her balloon — so she can shoot them off in the night sky.  She takes up a torch on a long pole to light them.  

One night in 1819 over Paris, Madame Blanchard inadvertently ignites the gas escaping from the balloon neck.  She desperately fights the flames while the crowd below applauds, thinking this is a new kind of fireworks.  Then they watch in horror as the balloon plunges and crashes on a roof.  She makes an incredible leap from the burning balloon onto the rooftop, but loses her footing, and falls to the street below.

In 1824, Thomas Harris takes his ladylove on a flight above the rolling hills of England.  His balloon has two cords reaching down into the basket; one to let the gas out slowly if the balloon goes up too fast; the second to let all the gas out just as the balloon lands.   Harris rises 2,000 feet and pulls the wrong one.

Instantly he realizes his mistake.  But now most of the gas is rushing out and the balloon descends at a fearsome rate.  He and his bride-to-be throw out everything in the basket — blankets, anchor, accessories from Abercrombie & Fitch, even the portable toilet.  But still they plunge.

What’s left?  Harris does the only thing he can to lighten the basket.  He throws himself out to save his beloved.  

Aeronauts discover that water won’t boil as quickly as at sea level, batteries lose power, sound doesn’t travel, and it’s cold up there.  They develop new instruments to measure height so they can now see the curve of the earth. And they pay the price for their knowledge.  At high altitudes they can’t breathe, and they bleed from the ears, eyes and mouth.  Oxygen deprivation makes them act drunk, pass out and die.

In 1862, James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell set a record by going seven miles up.  The cold and the lack of oxygen paralyze them.  When they attempt to pull the cord that will let out the gas and bring them down, it’s tangled in the rigging above.

Still able to move, Coxwell slowly climbs the rigging.  When he reaches the cord, he finds his fingers are frozen.  With his last ounce of energy, he reaches up with his teeth, pulls it, and then falls backward into the basket.  The balloon descends and they’re saved.  But others aren’t so lucky. 

Some attempt a different sort of flight: with wings.  Aeronauts attach primitive wings to their balloons.  But they have a problem.  No motor yet invented can drive a balloon against the wind.

There are only two ways up into the sky.  One is the balloon.  It keeps its place in the sky because of its buoyancy, like a cork on water.  The other is the bird.  Its wings have more curve on top than on bottom.  Since the air rushing from front to back has to get there at the same time, the air on top has to move faster.  This creates a “tear” in the air — a low-pressure area — that lifts the wing.

The trick is, like a bird, you have to keep moving.  Either you flow through the wind, or — like the soaring bird — the wind flows past you.  If you stop, you fall, if you fall, you die.  

Perhaps the most profound thinker is Frenchman Alphonse Penard.  He wants to be a naval officer, but he’s stricken with a crippling bone disease and spends his life on crutches.  He can sail only in his own mind.  

But in his mind he is able to design a primitive helicopter and the prototype of the modern airplane.  

Penard invents all the elements of the modern airplane: wings, rudder and elevators.  In 1871, he hobbles into the Tuileries in Paris, and flies his scale model to the cheers of the French Society of Aerial Navigation.  From that moment on, he dedicates his life to flight.

But the Society becomes jealous of Penard.  Like Icarus, he has flown too high.  When Penard tries to raise money for his man-carrying airplane, he fails.  Dejected, defeated and out of money, he kills himself at the age of 30.