HIGGINS@FNAL.BITNET (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) (01/28/89)
Another recent issue of *Aerospace Historian* (Fall/September 1988)
had "Birdmen of the Middle East: Early Attempts at Human Flight," by
Gary Leiser, a USAF historian specializing in Islamic history. It's a
review of flight legends in the Arabic world, and among other things
it covers an incident not even whispered about in most Western books
on the history of rocketry, space travel, or science fiction.
Leiser quotes, and so will I, from a seventeenth-century account by
Evilya Chelebi. This supposedly happened around 1633 in Istanbul.
(Arabic speakers, please pardon my slaughter of the transliterations!)
"This Lagari Hasan had fabricated a seven-cylinder rocket using 50
okkas [about 64 kg] of gunpowder compound. When the Sultan was at
Saray Point, he got on the rocket and his apprentices lit the fuse of
the rocket. Saying, 'My Sultan, I have recommended you to God. I am
going to speak with the Prophet Jesus,' and, praising and glorifying
God, he made his ascent to the highest heaven... At the roof of the
heavens, the powder of the great rocket was exhausted and when it
descended toward the earth, he opened the eagle wings that he had in
his hands and landed in the water in front of the mansion of Sinan
Pasha. He swam from there and came naked to the Sultan. He kissed the
ground and began to joke, saying. 'My Sultan, the Prophet Jesus sends
you his regards.'"
Leiser doesn't believe a word of this, but he says, "Evilya's account
does show that the Turks had the ability to make large rockets, that
some Turks had contemplated human flight by means of rockets as early
as the seventeenth century, and that they may have even experimented
with such a flight." I find it interesting that this account was
written only a few years after Cyrano de Bergerac published his own
account of rocket-powered spaceflight, in his *Voyage to the Moon*.
This issue also carried an article about the Army Air Corps/USAF
attempts to control erupting volcanoes in Hawaii by bombing to
divert lava flow.
*Air Power Historian*
$25/year (first two years for price of one for new members) from
Maj. Gen. Ramsay D. Potts
Publisher
Air Force Historical Foundation
Building 1413, Room 120
Stop 44
Andrews AFB, MD 20331
Bill Higgins
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
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