We partner with a secure submission system to handle manuscript submissions.
Please note:
You will need an account for the submission system, which is separate to your Cambridge Core account. For login and submission support, please visit the
submission and support pages.
Please review this journal's author instructions, particularly the
preparing your materials
page, before submitting your manuscript.
Click Proceed to submission system to continue to our partner's website.
To save this undefined to your undefined account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your undefined account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The question which I propose to consider in the following pages is a very old one, and one which is almost universally answered with a confident negative. It is this: “Can man imitate the flight of birds by means of a machine set in motion by his own muscular power?” For the sake of brevity, I will call this the problem of man-flight. As I have said, the great majority of people will answer at once, “No,” and will give as their reason the alleged fact that man has not enough power. The fact that a man can raise himself by means of a ladder seemed, however, to me to prove that he is possessed of sufficient power, the difficulty or impossibility of the problem lying in the difficulty or impossibility of constructing an apparatus which should be at the same time reasonably light, and yet take firm hold of the air. In considering this question, the first thing to be done was evidently to ascertain the power a man can exert.
