Wan Hu ( Chinese trade. 萬戶 , exercise р , pinyin : wàn hù or Chinese trade. 萬 虎 , exercise 万 虎 , pinyin : wàn hù , supposedly lived at the turn of the 15th – 16th centuries [1] ) - Chinese legendary official, scientist and supposedly the first balloonist [2] , who invented the aircraft with a rocket engine [3] .
The Wan Hu machine, according to legend, consisted of two kites , a seat and 47 rockets filled with gunpowder [4] . According to the same legend, he died from a rocket explosion while trying to start his car [5] . The reliability of the story of Wan Hu is greatly questioned by scholars, since there is no information about Wan Hu in the historical sources of the Ming Dynasty .
On October 2, 1909, Scientific American allegedly published an article by John Elfret Watkins about a similar event, but the hero’s name is Wan Tu, and the attempt to fly allegedly took place 200 years before the advent of a new era [1] ; at the same time, it was in this article for the first time in the European language that 47 helpers were supposed to launch a balloonist, and the machine he built consisted of kites, armchairs and rockets - the same information is found in later publications.
The name Wan Hu was first used by Willy Ley in Rockets: The Future of Travel beyond the Stratosphere, published in 1944. He relates the event to the beginning of the XVI century and indicates, in particular, that Wan Hu was going to travel to space and for this purpose, having assembled his car, ordered his 47 ministers to start it by lighting many fireworks, but when they did this, something happened the explosion and both the aircraft and Wan Hu himself turned to ashes. Subsequently, the version described by Lei was included in many other publications on aviation topics, for example, in The Civil Air Patrol of 1949 [1] .
In 1997, a Chinese writer, Qi Shuin, in his book on the biography of the scientist Qian Xuesen , claimed that, being familiar with him, he told the "story of Wan Hu" [6] . However, the writer Ron Miller in his work “The Dream Machines” notes that most modern Sinologists - for example, Joseph Needham - consider the story of Wan Hu to be completely fictitious because of both the fantastic nature and the many contradictions in it, and the lack of sources in 1909 of the year. History itself, in his opinion, can be an arrangement (Chinese or European) of an oriental tale of the 17th-19th centuries [1] .
In honor of Wan Hu named one of the craters on the moon [7] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 The Rise and Fall of Wan Hu, Chinese Rocketeer
- ↑ Timeline of Rocket History . Marshall Space Flight Center , NASA . Date of treatment January 28, 2013.
- ↑ Richard Tregaskis. X-15 diary: the story of America's first space ship . - New York: University of Nebraska Press, 2004 .-- P. 70-71. - ISBN 0-8032-9456-5 .
- ↑ Joseph A. Angelo. Human Spaceflight . - New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007 .-- P. 5. - ISBN 978-0-8160-5775-7 .
- ↑ David Darling. The complete book of spaceflight: from Apollo 1 to zero gravity . - Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2003 .-- P. 77. - ISBN 0-471-05649-9 .
- ↑ 大漠 荒原 与 航天 城堡 ， 2012 年 9 月 26 日 查阅
- ↑ Doris Simonis. Inventors and Inventions . - Marshall Cavendish, 2007 .-- Vol. 3. - P. 707. - ISBN 978-0-7614-7766-2 .