The man who imagined the spaceship in 1657 | Science and health



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The first description of a machine specially designed for space travel was made in a book published in 1657.

It was a box large enough for a pbadenger, with a hollow crystal ceiling that focused the sun's rays. . The warm air inside this space was rising and pbading through a tube at the top while the air was coming from below. The inventor pointed out that this aerial aspiration propelled the machine.

The takeoff was described as follows: "Suddenly, I felt my stomach tremble, like a man brought up by a camera.I was about to open the hatch to discover the cause of this feeling, but when I reached out, I noticed through the hole in the floor of my box that my tower was already far below me, and my little castle in the air, pushed under my feet, m & # 39; gave a brief glimpse of Toulouse sinking into the Earth. "

Although the operation of this vacuum propulsion is not entirely clear, it is amazing that some speculation about travels in space in the middle of the 17th century.

Who was this person who imagined a vehicle to explore new worlds far from the Earth?

This was a Frenchman whose name may sound familiar: Cyrano de Bergerac. But we are not talking about the character with the big nose represented by Gerard Depardieu in the film of the same name of 1990 or Steve Martin in the film of Roxanne in 1987.

Cyrano de Bergerac was a real person who lived in the 17th century in La France. And his life was a lot more interesting than the romantic comedy.

Poet, playwright, thinker and libertine

He was called Hercules-Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), but he was not really from Bergerac. He simply adopted the elegant title because his Parisian family owned a small farm in Gascony.

  The fictional character takes the name of Cyrano de Bergerac, but his nose has grown with time - Photo: Getty Images   The fictional character takes the name of Cyrano his nose has grown with time - Photo: Getty Images

The fictional character takes the name of Cyrano de Bergerac, although, in the long run,

He was a soldier, a player and a duelist who withdrew from military feats because of wounds, to 1639, at the age of 20 years. He attended a university and, judging by his work, was very aware of the philosophical and scientific debates of his time.

He wrote essays of several genres. He created plays of which Molière (1622-1673) stole the stage. There were political satires and even published a collection of fictitious love letters, which ridiculed the solemn and amorphous eloquence by which the fictional character who bears his name is known.

But his most successful works are perhaps two books, The States and Empires of the Moon and Its Extension The States and Empires of the Sun.

No books have been published during the short life of Cyrano de Bergerac. were printed by one of his friends two years after his death.

As in Tomas Morus' Utopia (1516), or Jonathan Swift's The Travels of Gulliver (1726), he makes fun of European civilization by taking advantage of encounters with foreigners, in the case of extraterrestrials. .

In addition, Cyrano de Bergerac's fantasies of spaceflight leave a scientific and technological legacy.

When Galileo Discovered the Moon

Traveling on the Moon was not a completely original concept of Cyrano de Bergerac.

From 1610, when Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) surprises everyone with a little book describing what he saw when he turned his telescope to Earth's natural satellite, this idea sparked enthusiasm.

The Italian scientist had announced that the Moon was not the smooth and perfect sphere as had the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC 322 BC). It's a world like ours.

"There are mountains and valleys," says Galileo, "clearly visible in the shadows that go beyond when the lunar day sets at night."

They all talked about the new world of Galilee, and some writers have considered it a species. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), discoverer of new horizons.

The most famous forerunner of fiction of Cyrano de Bergerac is a book written around 1628 by an Englishman named Francis Godwin (1562-1633) who, as bishop of Hereford, proved that he embodied the new image of the proposed cosmos. Galileo did not want to clash with religious beliefs.

Godwin's book called The Man on the Moon, his hero is a Spaniard named Domingo Gonsales and he travels dramatically by hanging a chariot to a band of wild geese migrating between Earth and Moon.

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Some thought that there were really such migrations of animals, because at that time no one knew that & # 39; there was no air in the space.

But the fantasy of the Moon of Cyrano de Bergerac is more ambitious. It is a satire in which the customs and characteristics of the societies with which the traveler finds himself are exaggerations or inventions, which shows that after all, everything is arbitrary.

This is the kind of ideology that the era of exploration has produced by questioning the old certainties.

The details concerning the real Cyrano de Bergerac are incomplete, but judging by his books, he was ironic and irreverent, but also intelligent and open minded.

In addition, his intrepid fictional hero was probably a self-portrait, because his name is virtually an anagram: Dyrcona.

Dyrcona makes his first trips on a ship made of dew bottles, based on the idea that dew evaporates because there is a kind of attraction for the sun. This plane breaks down and crashes in Canada.

  Dew was unable to take Dyrcona to the moon, but only to Canada - Photo: Getty Images   Dew was not able to take Dyrcona to the moon, just in Canada - Photo: Getty Images "title =" Dew was not able to take Dyrcona to the moon, but to Canada - photo: Getty Images "data-src =" https://s2.glbimg.com/ RBbEyttXJGWCYRe = / 0x0: 976x950 / 984x0 / smart / filters: strip_c () / i.s3.b / s. Dew could not take Dyrcona to the moon, only Canada - Photo: Getty Images </p>
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However, it can reach the moon thanks to a force of attraction between the moon and the bone marrow that Dyrcona had smeared bruises to heal him.

Although this seems a purely medieval superstition, it is an expression of the existing doubts of the time. Natural philosophers still did not fully understand the forces of nature.

It was thought, for example, that the mysterious force that drove a compbad to the north indicated that the Earth itself was a giant magnet: a crazy idea at the time, but one which was revealed true.

These proto-scientists were disconcerted by the force of gravity, which resembled magnetism.

So it is clear that the moon does not attract bone marrow, but as other invisible forces of nature seemed so fantastic and strange, it was not uncommon. imagine such a thing.

Throughout his travels, Dyrcona constantly leads philosophical debates on scientific ideas with other characters.

In Canada, he discusses with the Viceroy the question of whether the Earth is at the center of the Universe, as Aristotle said, or the Sun, as the insisted Galileo.

The same spaceship that Dyrcona uses to get to the sun involves Aristotle's idea that emptiness was by nature impossible, an issue that at the time provoked heated debate. between philosophers of nature.

This idea was transmitted to Dyrcona on the Moon by Domingo Gonsales, the hero of Francis Godwin's previous book, who – in a wonderful fragment of metanarrative – appears as a kind of mascot of the gigantic animal man who govern the Moon.

Gonsales admits to Dyrcona that he left Earth desperate because the Spanish Inquisition had repressed his anti-Aristotelian visions.

When Dyrcona returns to Earth, he writes The States and Empires of the Moon and accuses him of being a wizard. So he goes to his empty box to visit the states and empires of the Sun, a "country so brilliant". , he says, "it looks like flaming snowflakes."

Discover that this luminous land is the place where souls go after the death of people.

And while most souls merge with the Sun, those of the philosophers survive. In the last sentences of the second book, which Cyrano de Bergerac never completed, Dyrcona begins a dialogue with one of the famous philosophers.

"There are many things that we read in his books that make us think" cool ", but at the time, they were dangerous," says Mary Baine Campbell of Brandeis University to the states -United. The comic story of states and empires of the worlds of the moon and the sun "was a satire of the time of discoveries and conquests – Photo: Getty Images" The comic story of the States and the empires of the worlds of the Moon and the Sun "was a satire l & # 39; era of discoveries and achievements – Photo: Getty Images" src = "data: image / jpeg; base64 / 9d / 4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD / 2wBDAAMCAgMCAgMDAwMEAwMEBQgFBQQEBQoHBwYIDAoMDAsKCwsNDhIQDQ4RDgsLEBYQERMUFRUVDA8XGBYUGBIUFRT / 2wBDAQMEBAUEBQkFBQkUDQsNFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBT / wgARCAAUABkDASIAAhEBAxEB / 8QAGQAAAwEBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIEBgMF / 8QAGAEAAgMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgQBAwX / 2gAMAwEAAhADEAAAAdBrktVwPaaAsfgQAVt5hJ // xAAdEAACAgIDAQAAAAAAAAAAAAACBAEDAAUREhMG / 9oACAEBAAEFAlTTk9ZxDwM1yXpGWEkRhsRtu9LoLtlfzClshpF9Sx2kM4z / xAAaEQEAAQU AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAIDEBIT / 9oACAEDAQE / AS5VvOkQx // EABcRAAMBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQESH / 2gAIAQIBAT8Bulf / xAAjEAABAwMEAgMAAAAAAAAA AAABAgMSABEhEBMiMTJhcZHw / 9oACAEBAAY / ArBtuUsybJqQbskIIlt2HYx1R5Y / etA6W / MQKU5Ch8CthlIStAPd6uFD3zVotU30zOQl0ig6yXSspKebhOKvc / en / 8QAHRAAAgMBAQADAAAAAAAAAAAAAREAITFhUUFxgf / aAAgBAQABPyE5vBjoDwaB59CEUUt5OKGNs8qELRGwq5PYxYa rJ30tmGTDjhVLLyXIgkZV78ROwyTyon8WRkKCvYGrjCEPSiT + / 9oADAMBAAIAAwAAABBW4Fz / xAAYEQEBAQEBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABEQAxgf / aAAgBAwEBPxCAKS 6saIY5v + / EABURAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEQ / 9oACAECAQE / EBxQn // EAB4QAQEAAgMBAAMAAAAAAAAAAAERACExQVFhkeHw / 9oACAEBAAE / EOUsoau27dY7AG3H28FaRgXEu + k7w / 3tFMc7bBHos58 / h / ePDugCkGRShBJbcHAEzkQC5tbHmcxzeC7pA6NKXgdTnefX8DDQQBFrUciqs7xRK73omjd03t9wfhD6r7Ez4Gf / 2Q == "/>   The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and the Sun" was a satire of the era of discoveries and achievements - photo: Getty Images "title =" L & # Comic story of states and empires of the worlds of the moon and the sun "was a satire of the time of discoveries and conquests - Photo: Getty Im ages "data-src =" https://s2.glbimg.com/fpBLX-2rKZHgQcjb68wbXPn-Anw=/0x0:976x794/984x0/smart/filters:strip_icc()/i.s3.glbimg.com/ </source></source></source></source></source></picture> </div>
<p clbad= " The comic history of states and empires of the worlds of the moon and the sun "was a satire of the time of discoveries and conquests. [1] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] – Photo: Getty Images

"At that time, people were interested in gravity because they wanted to leave the planet, but they knew something was not allowed Although some of the methods invented by Cyrano for Dyrcona are comical – like drops of dew – others – like the rocket-propelled ship that lights up in stages and burns pieces as the stage progresses. – have proven to be things that we know that they work, "said Campbell.

" There are also some surprising facts, such as missing a quarter of the way to reach the moon, and Dyrcona notes that it is she who pulls it.This, in addition to being mathematically exact, is very interesting because it implies to think that the gravitational attraction of the Earth is not unique and that d & # 39; Other bodies can have it, but at the moment I wrote it Once again, I suggested that the Earth may not be the center of the Universe. The notes of this style today amuse us and surprise us, but at the time, they were potentially dangerous. "

Cyrano de Bergerac did not die for his ideas, however, and he fell victim to a beam that fell on his head at the age of 36.

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