Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/471

Rh estimations previously given by Navier. This experiment demonstrated that the muscular strength of birds, although notably greater, for equal weights, than that of mammals, did not exceed a reasonable estimation.

Our helicopterons and areoplanes which performed with success on the 2d of July, 1875, before the Physical Society, have a numerous offspring. They have been imitated with various success by Crocé-Spinelli and MM. Montfallet, Pétard, and Tantin.

The action of these machines, in fully confirming our ideas and calculations on the resistance of the atmosphere, encouraged us to attempt the construction of a mechanical bird with flapping wings. The diversity of the hypotheses as to the nature of flight, proposed in France and in England, though bearing witness to the difficulties to be met with in the construction of this mechanism, yet rendered the problem peculiarly interesting.

The experiments heretofore made with mechanical birds had been very discouraging. M. Artingstall and M. Marey had alone obtained effective results. M. Artingstall states that, some thirty years since, he had an artificial bird which flew at the end of a tube jointed on to a steam-boiler. M. Marey, whose beautiful physiological experiments are so well known, constructed, in 1870, artificial insects which, attached to a radial tube carrying a counterpoise equal to two-thirds of their weight, rose and flew in a circle by the aid of their wings. The compressed air which set the wings in motion was conveyed to them through the radial tube from a compression-pump worked by hand. It remained to gain the two-thirds of the weight of the insect and to cause the latter to carry with it its motor instead of having the wings moved by a force conveyed to the insect from without.

Encompassed by the divers hypotheses of the action of the wing given by Borelli, Huber, Dutrochet, Strauss-Durckeim, Liais, Pettigrew, Marey, d'Esterno, De Lucy, Artingstall, etc., and in view of the very complicated motions they had assigned to that organ and to each of its quills—motions which are, for the most part, inimitable in a mechanical bird—we decided to reason out for ourselves, by relying on the laws of the resistance of the air and on some of the most simple facts of observation, what are the motions of the wing really necessary to flight. We found—1. A double oscillation, a depression, and an elevation of the wings transverse to the path of flight. 2. The change of the plane of the same during this double motion; the lower surface of the wing facing below and behind during its depression, so as to sustain the bird, the same surface of the wing facing below and in front during its elevation, so that the wing is raised with the least resistance by cutting the air with its edge while the bird flies. These movements, moreover, were admitted to be correct by a large