First powered manned flight. 1633?

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagari_Hasan_%C3%87elebi

Lagari Hasan Çelebi was an Ottoman Turk who was the first person to have made an artificially powered manned rocket flight.

According to Evliya Çelebi in the 17th century, Lagari Hasan Çelebi was launched in the air in a rocket, which was composed of a large cage with a conical top filled with gunpowder. The flight was accomplished as a part of celebrations performed for the birth of Ottoman Emperor Murat IV's daughter in 1633.

He is said to have made a soft landing in the Bosporus by using the wings attached to his body after the gunpowder was consumed and was rewarded by the sultan with a valuable military position in the Ottoman army. The flight was estimated to have lasted about twenty seconds and the maximum height reached around 300 metres.

What a nutter. Still, check this page out for claimants to the Wright brothers' title-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_flying_machine

Just how satisfactory do you find the accolades given to the Wrights?

[Nikolai]

Whoever was first in the true sense of the word is pretty unimportant really, what matters is that the Wright brothers was the first who made that kind of flight successful in society's eyes. In the end, who cares that a Turk did the same as the Wrights two hundred years earlier, when nothing came of it?

[Proteus_MST]

Especially interesting that already in the 9th century the first mostly successful attempt at parachuting and gliding has been made.
Around 1000 years before Otto Lilienthal and the tailor of Ulm.

One wonders why there haven´t been many more experiments since then. Maybe religious restrictions that hindered science?

[Nikolai]

I think there is more of a question of need. Science can discover whatever it can, and it does, but if the people/society does not see/have the need for the invention at that particular time, it will ultimately fall into oblivion.

[Zkribbler]

What about the Chinese guy, who strapped a whole bunch of rockets to his chair. The fuses were lit; the rockets went BOOM, and no body was ever found, proving he'd been shot into orbit.

[Kuciwalker]

Just how satisfactory do you find the accolades given to the Wrights?

No one could have taken what he did and made useful aircraft out of it. The Wrights came up with a design that could, with further refinement, produce something useful.

[Lord Avalon]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
What about the Chinese guy, who strapped a whole bunch of rockets to his chair. The fuses were lit; the rockets went BOOM, and no body was ever found, proving he'd been shot into orbit.

I saw that on Mythbusters! Poor Buster!

[VetLegion]

I thought this was going to be about the sequel to 1632 which is aptly named 1633.

It's an alternative history book about a small town from Virginia getting teleported to Germany in 1632, right in the middle of the thirty years war.

[BeBMan]

Sounds like that Muenchhausen story....