Today, the empire finally takes to the air. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
A photo of Major Baden
Baden-Powell, taken in his later life, looks like a
character straight out of Kipling. Born in 1860,
Baden-Powell lived most of his life in that British
empire upon which the sun never set. Sun-burnt,
mustached, hard-eyed, with a chest full of medals,
he was a creature of another age.
Yet Baden-Powell wasn't quite what he appeared to
be. He did join the Scots Guards at the age of 21.
He saw action in the service of his Queen -- the
Nile campaign, the Boer War, even WW-I. Throughout
all that, his passion was not war, but flight.
You might recognize his name because his older
brother, the Baron Robert Baden-Powell, is famous
for founding the Boy Scouts. But young Baden
Baden-Powell wanted to fly.
In 1880 he joined the Royal Aeronautical Society
and soon decided they were too much talk, not
enough action. So he bought his own balloon and
learned to fly it. Within a year of joining the
army, he was lecturing on military uses of
By that time, the American Army had made good use
of observation balloons in the Civil War, and the
French had used balloons to get mail out of Paris
during the German siege of 1870.
In 1894, Baden-Powell made the first British
military balloon flight. But he was a gadfly, a
pot-stirrer, and a gatherer of information about
flight. And his interests soon turned to
man-carrying reconnaissance kites. (The Chinese had
flown humans in kites 1300 years before him, but no
one had done it in the West.) Baden-Powell
developed a system of four kites along a rope, and
it carried him as far as 300 feet up in a basket
The Aeronautical Society had dwindled to three
members when Baden-Powell set out to rebuild it.
When he wrote to the great scientist, Lord Kelvin,
Kelvin replied that he had "not a molecule of
faith" in flight. No matter. Baden-Powell also
wrote an article that spoke with a prescience
worthy of Nostradamus.
What will the good citizens of London say when
they see a hostile dynamite-carrying aerostat
hovering over St. Paul's?
Forty-two years later we saw the dome of St. Paul's
Cathedral by night, standing dimly against the
smoke and flame of German bombs.
After his kites, Baden-Powell built gliders, then a
powered airplane. He touched all aspects of flight.
He really did rebuild the Aeronautical Society --
and he drove England to build the base of knowledge
it needed to catch up with America and France.
And I'm back to that photo. A shy man; a stern man;
a man with eyes that gaze outward and bore into you,
but which look inward; a firmly controlled face; an
uncomfortable mouth -- medals polished, buttons aligned.
This is no warrior after all. Neither is it really an
inventor. This is a visionary who has seen, with
eerie clarity, a new world that he is bound to
share with us.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds