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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.
This is how the takeoff was described: " Suddenly, I felt my stomach tremble, like a man erected using a device, I was going to open the hatch for J & # 39; I discovered 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 well below me, and my little castle in the air, pushed under my feet, let me glimpse when Toulouse sinks into the Earth. "
Although the operation of this suction propulsion is not quite Clearly, it is amazing that someone speculates on space travel in the mid-seventeenth century.
Who was this person who imagined a vehicle exploring new worlds far from the Earth?
He was a Frenchman whose name may sound familiar: Cyrano de Bergerac. But we do not speak about the character with the big nose represented by Gerard Depardieu in the film of the same name of 1990, nor of Steve Martin in the film Roxanne 1987.
Poet, playwright, thinker and libertine
He called Hercules-Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) but he did not really come from Bergerac, he simply adopted the elegant title because his Parisian family owned a small farm in Gascony
He was a soldier, a player and a duelist who had retired from military explosions after wounds, around 1639, at the age of 20. He attended a university and, judging from his work, was very aware of the philosophical and scientific debates of his time.
But his most successful works are perhaps two books, The States and Empires of the Moon
No books have been published during the short life of Cyrano de Bergerac but they were printed by one of his friends two years after his death.
As in Utopia (1516), by Tomas Morus, or by Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, he makes fun of the
When Galileo discovered the moon
When Galileo discovered the moon
When Galileo discovered the moon
When Galileo discovered the moon
Traveling on the moon n
From 1610, when Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642) surprised everyone with a little book describing what he had seen when he had turned his telescope to Earth's natural satellite, there was enthusiasm around this idea. ” clbad=”img img-responsive image-large”/>
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). "There are mountains and valleys," said Galileo, "clearly in the shadows that go beyond when the lunar day goes down at night."
They all talked about Galileo's new world, and some writers considered him a kind of second Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), discovering new horizons.
A Spaniard on the Moon
The most famous forerunner of Cyrano de Bergerac's fiction was a book written around 1628 by an Englishman named Francis Godwin (1562-1633), who, as bishop of Hereford proves that welcoming the new image of the cosmos proposed by Galileo did not mean coming into conflict with religious beliefs.
Godwin's book called The Man in Lu a. His hero is a Spaniard named Domingo Gonsales and he travels dramatically by hitching a hitch to a bunch of wild geese that migrate between the Earth and the Moon.
There were those who thought there really were such migrations of animals, because at that time, no one knew that it was n & # 39; There was no air in the space.
But the lunar fantasy 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 produced by defying the old The details about the real Cyrano de Bergerac are incomplete but, judging by his books, he was ironic and irreverent, but also intelligent and open minded.
Dyrcona makes his first voyages 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 plan fails and it falls in Canada.
Although this may seem like a mere medieval superstition, it is an expression of the doubts that existed at the time.Natural philosophers still did not understand the forces of nature
It was thought, for example, that the mysterious force that forms a compbad to the north indicates that the Earth itself was a giant magnet: a crazy idea for the
So it is clear that the Moon does not attract the bone marrow but, as it has been found that other forces
A challenge to the sacred
Throughout his journey, Dyrcona is constantly engaged in philosophical debates about ideas scientists with other characters. 19659002] 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 Galileo asked.
The same spaceship that Dyrcona uses to get to the Sun. challenged Aristotle's idea that emptiness was by nature impossible, an issue that at the time aroused heated debate among philosophers of natural science. Domingo Gonsales, the hero of the previous book of Francis Godwin, who – in a wonderful fragment of metanarrative – appears as a kind of mascot of the gigantic animal-man who reigns on the Moon.
Gonsales Confesses To Dyrcona That He Left The Earth In
Flames Flaming In The Snow
When Dyrcona Returns To Earth, He Writes The States And Empires Of The Moon and accuses him of being a wizard, so he goes off to his empty box to visit the states and empires of the Sun, a "country so bright," he says, "which looks like flakes "
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 finished, Dyrcona begins a dialogue with one of the famous philosophers.
"There are many things we read in his books that make us think" cool! "were dangerous," says Mary Baine Campbell of Brandeis University in the United States. ” clbad=”img img-responsive image-large”/>
"At that time, people were interested in gravity because they wanted to leave the planet, but they knew something, although some of the methods invented by Cyrano for Dyrcona are comical – like drops of dew – and others – like the rocket-propelled ship that is lit in stages and from which parts go out as it goes – we now know things are working, "says Campbell.
"In addition, there are some surprising facts, such as missing a quarter of the way to reach the moon, and Dyrcona notes that he is the one who pulls it.This, in addition to being mathematically exact, is very interesting because it implies to think that the attraction of Earth's gravity is not unique and that other bodies can have it. But by the time I was writing it, I was suggesting a time again that Earth may not have been the center The notes of this style today are amusing and surprising to us, but at the time they were potentially dangerous. "
However, Cyrano de Bergerac does not die because of his ideas, he is the victim of a beam that falls on his head at the age of 36. years
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