Vincent de Groof's Ornithopter
Illustration of de Groof in his ornithopter, flying among the clouds. Engraving from an 1890 issue of Scientific American.
This is Vincent de Groof’s design for an ornithopter, built and tested in Bruges and London in the 1870’s. Details about de Groof’s life are sketchy, and newspaper articles from his day tend to contradict themselves, but one consistent fact is that he was called The Flying Man. His goal was to achieve flight, and he believed it was possible for a human to fly by imitating the flight of a bird. As such, he developed a design for an ornithopter, which is a machine that flies with flapping wings. His ornithopter had two large wings made out of cane and waterproof silk. The wings were attached to a small wooden platform, where the aeronaut would stand. It was controlled by three levers: two to flap the wings and one to steer the craft.[1]
In his pursuit of flight, de Groof began testing out ideas and designs while he lived in Bruges, Belgium in the late 1860’s and early 1870’s. Then, sometime in 1874, he moved to London to further test his ornithopter designs. For these tests, he would ascend in a balloon with his machine attached, and once the desired height was reached he would release the craft and glide back down to Earth. These attempts were a mixture of success and failure, and they drew considerable interest from the public. On one occasion in 1873 in Bruges, after crash-landing, his wreckage was pillaged by a crowd of onlookers.[2]
The Fall of Vincent de Groof. Illustration from the book Les Merveilles de la Science, published in 1887.
Unfortunately, the risks of testing out a flying machine at great heights build up over time. They caught up with de Groof on July 2, 1874 in London. He ascended in a balloon with aeronaut Charles Simmons, and after rising a few hundred feet, de Groof instructed Simmons to descend to a lower height. After descending to around eighty feet above the ground, he cut his ornithopter loose. Normally, his craft would gently glide down to the surface, but on this occasion the ornithopter collapsed shortly after being cut loose, sending de Groof plummeting to the ground.[3] Thousands of onlookers watched in horror as The Flying Man fell to his death.
The sad ending to de Groof’s story is a stark reminder of the dangers involved with height and human flight. It reminds me of a quote from the 2006 film Miami Vice, when Sonny Crocket is talking about the consequences of a life of crime: Things go wrong. The odds catch up. Probability is like gravity. You cannot negotiate with gravity. This quote perfectly sums up de Groof’s ultimate fate. The odds caught up with him and he paid for it with his life, but the dream of flight was so powerful that it was worth the risk. It goes to show just how deep the need for verticality goes within us. We seek it out and take on massive risks to achieve it, and throughout history many of us have given our lives in the pursuit of it.
Read more about other ideas for flying machines here.
[1]: “Death of the ‘Flying Man.’” London Daily Telegraph, July 3, 1874.
[2]: ibid.
[3]: “The Perils of Flying.” Scientific American 31 (August 15, 1874): 99.