than the modern and was more advanced in knowledge. It is claimed that
steam engines and electricity were common in Egypt thousands of years
ago and that literature, science, art, and architecture flourished as
never since. Certain it is that the Pyramids were for a long time the
most solid "Skyscrapers" in the world.

Perhaps, after all, our boasted progress is but a case of going back
to first principles, of history, or rather tradition repeating itself.
The flying machine may not be as new as we think it is. At any rate
the conception of it is old enough.

In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, often called the "Father of
Philosophy," maintained that the air could be navigated. He suggested
a hollow globe of copper to be filled with "ethereal air or liquid
fire," but he never tried to put his suggestion into practice. Father
Vasson, a missionary at Canton, in a letter dated September 5, 1694,
mentions a balloon that ascended on the occasion of the coronation of
the Empress Fo-Kien in 1306, but he does not state where he got the
information.

The balloon is the earliest form of air machine of which we have record.
In 1767 a Dr. Black of Edinburgh suggested that a thin bladder could
be made to ascend if filled with inflammable air, the name then given
to hydrogen gas.

In 1782 Cavallo succeeded in sending up a soap bubble filled with such
gas.

It was in the same year that the Montgolfier brothers of Annonay, near
Lyons in France, conceived the idea of using hot air for lifting things