In 1678, Besnier, a French locksmith, constructed a curious flying machine consisting of two wooden bars which rested on his shoulders. At the ends of the bars he attached muslin wings, arranged to open on the down stroke and close on the up stroke. The wings were operated by moving the arms and legs. Although Besnier failed to realize that no man had sufficient muscular strength to fly as the bird flies, he did sense part of the truth--that gliding with the air currents was possible. During his experiments he is said to have jumped from a window sill, glided over the roof of a near-by cottage, and landed on a barge in the river. [Illustration: BESNIER AND HIS WINGS] In 1799 an Englishman, George Cayley, conceived the idea that a kite could be built large enough to carry him up into the air. Instead of a string to hold the kite against the wind he decided to use the weight of his own body. He built a huge kite with a sustaining surface of three hundred square feet. When he held on to it and ran against the wind, the kite did indeed lift and carry him some distance through the air. Cayley’s kite was the first glider and also the very beginning of the modern airplane. Wonderful though it may have seemed to him, no one paid any attention to Cayley’s discovery until 1867, when F. H. Wenham, also an Englishman, came to the conclusion that if a glider were attached to a propeller driven by an engine, it would fly. Wenham was right, of course, but he left his fine logic for other men to use. He did, however, leave something else by which we may remember him. He coined the word _aëroplane_. He took the Greek _aëro_, meaning air, and joined to it the Latin _planus_, meaning flat. The British still use the world _aëroplane_, but we in America use the simpler form _airplane_. The first successful attempt to fly was made in France on June 5, 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated their hot-air balloon. It rose to the height of one thousand feet and remained aloft for ten minutes. Benjamin Franklin, then in France, witnessed a flight of the Montgolfier balloon and referred to it in his chronicles. (As this book tells the story of the airplane, we shall not describe in detail the free balloon.)