Clement Ader - Did He Invent The First Airplane?
CLEMENT ADER (1841-1925) Clement Ader was facinated with aerial navigation for many years.
Ader worked in the Dept. of Public Works for 15 years but quit his job to work on his inventions. Amongst other things, he designed a microphone, a public-address device, and the first telephone system in Paris, but he never gave up on his interest in aeronautics. In the early 1870s he designed and built an ornithopter, an engine to which was attached flapping wings, but it failed to fly. He promptly scrapped the design of the ornithopter as impractical after studying vultures in Algiers. He decided that in order for a machine to get off the ground the machine must have fixed wings and an engine capable of lifting it into the air. Back in France, he built his first airplane, the Eole (named for Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds).
"The Eole had bat-shaped wings and was driven by a steam engine attached to a four-blade propeller. Ader tested his airplane near Gretz-Armainvilliers on Oct. 9, 1890, and claimed that he accomplished a takeoff and a powered flight of approximately 165 ft. There were a few witnesses to his feat but they were not familiar with aeronautics, and consequently none of them reported what he saw. Ader asserted that he had tested the Eole a second time at the army base at Satory near Versailles in September of 1891 and flew roughly 330 ft. at an altitude of 8 in. above the ground before crashing. There supposedly was only one witness; he did not make a statement to authorities about what he saw. Ader himself did not publicly report this flight until 1906." (www.trivia-library.com)
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