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Updated: June 10, 2025
Equipped with a pair of large feather wings operated on the Besnier principle, he launched himself from the battlements of Stirling Castle in the presence of King James and his court.
It was in 1867 that the two brothers began really practical work, experimenting with wings which, from their design, indicate some knowledge of Besnier and the history of his gliding experiments; these wings the brothers fastened to their backs, moving them with their legs after the fashion of one attempting to swim.
Da Vinci's work was forgotten flight was an impossibility, or at best such a useless show as Besnier was able to give. The eighteenth century was almost barren of experiment. Emanuel Swedenborg, having invented a new religion, set about inventing a flying machine, and succeeded theoretically, publishing the result of his investigations as follows:
Time after time the "flapping wings" were resorted to by ambitious aviators with results akin to those attained by Darius Green. One of the earliest was a French locksmith named Besnier, who had four collapsible planes on two rods balanced across his shoulders.
But whatever the imitators of Besnier may have accomplished, to the honest smith must be accorded the full credit of their success, and with his simple, but brilliant, record left at flood mark, the tide of progress ebbed back again, while mankind ruminated over the great problem in apparent inactivity. But not for long.
Among the recruits to the ranks of pioneers was a certain Besnier, a locksmith of Sable, who somewhere between 1675 and 1680 constructed a glider of which a crude picture has come down to modern times.
Having by experiment proved his apparatus successful, Besnier promptly sold it to a travelling showman of the period, and forthwith set about constructing a second set, with which he made gliding flights of considerable height and distance.
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