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Leonardo da Vinci designed a flying machine in the 15th century, and by the 19th century men were airborne in hot-air balloons, gliders, and huge kites.

depended on the whimsy of the wind

And so, at the end of the 19th century, enthusiasts around the world joined in the race to invent the first flying machine.

ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT

In 1897 he flew in a balloon for the first time and thereafter became one of the foremost balloonists in France.

In 1905 he built an airplane consisting of three box kites connected to each other by bamboo poles, powered by a steam engine.

Ader kept working to perfect his airplane, and finally, with the financial backing of the French Army, he built Avion III, a flying machine similar in design to the Eole but with a longer wingspan and two four-blade propellers. On Oct. 14, 1897, Ader tested his Avion at Satory with a military observer team present. Ader claimed that that day he had again flown, but three witnesses disagreed with each other about whether Ader actually took off and flew the Avion before it crashed.

SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY

Langley was soon experimenting with models, the first of which were powered by rubber bands

johnny campell

Born on January 4, 1809, Coupvray, France, Braille was accidentally blinded in one eye at the age of three. Within two years, a disease in his other eye left him completely blind.

Captain Charles Barbier invented sonography, or nightwriting, a system of embossed symbols used by soldiers to communicate silently at night on the battlefield. Inspired by a lecture Barbier gave at the Institute a few years later, the fifteen-year-old Braille adapted Barbier's system to replace Haüy's awkward embossed type, which he and his classmates had been obliged to learn.

In his initial study, Braille had experimented with geometric shapes cut from leather as well as with nails and tacks hammered into boards. He finally settled on a fingertip-sized six-dot code, based on the twenty-five letters of the alphabet, which could be recognized with a single contact of one digit. By varying the number and placement of dots, he coded letters, punctuation, numbers, diphthongs, familiar words, scientific symbols, mathematical and musical notation, and capitalization. With the right hand, the reader touched individual dots and, with the left, moved on toward the next line, comprehending as smoothly and rapidly as sighted readers. Using the Braille system, students were also able to take notes and write themes by punching dots into paper with a pointed stylus which was aligned with a metal guide.

It was invented by Louis Braille (1809-1852), a French teacher of the blind. It consists of patterns of raised dots arranged in cells of up to six dots in a 3 x 2 configuration.

Each cell represents a letter, numeral or punctuation mark.

Grade 3, which is used only in personal letters, diaries, and notes. It is a kind of shorthand, with entire words shortened to a few letters.

Eventhough parachutes seem to have been used in China since the 1100s and that Leonardo da Vinci of Italy had invented devices similar to parachutes nowadays, worldwide skydivers state that the French inventor André-Jacques Garnerin is the one to make the first parachute. In 1797 he jumped from a balloon over Paris using a parachute and kept on making other jumps in France and also in England.

In World War I , that is between 1914 and 1918, the military began using parachutes in their missions