The Imitation of nature? Flapping flight and animal forms as models for human flight

Abstract

Human flight has a dual historiography. Earlier accounts often derived from writers who had been professionally engaged in aeronautics and who also had a historical bent More recently aviation has become a subject of interest for academically‐based historians. Nevertheless, both kinds of history have, almost inevitably, focused on what has been achieved, with the apparent dead‐ends and lacunae in experiment relegated to the footnotes. This has certainly applied to the field of flapping flight and the wider subject of the study of animal models in flight experiments. There may even have been a kind of discrete reticence concerning the analysis of attempts to imitate bird or bat flight and a perception that to describe such obviously doomed attempts in detail might be taken as holding them up to ridicule. On another level, such a study might have been regarded as intellectually disreputable and uncomfortably close to Whiggery. However, the desire to model human flight on natural examples is one of the “endu...