The Beginning Of Flight And Space Travel

A French prison inmate was in the headlines this week with a daring escape from prison by helicopter. France has a tradition of prison escapes by helicopter that goes back a number of years. Prisons actually have netting in place in an effort to prevent helicopter escapes.

Why is it that France, a European nation without a high prison population and with some of the most "civilized" prisons in the world, would have such a tradition of prison escapes by helicopter? The answer is a great illustration of how humans came to fly in the first place, as well as how history repeats itself.

People have always watched birds and wondered if there was some way that they could fly too. But have you ever wondered if there was some event that provided the impetus to actually get people flying? It turns out that there was, and it was the British fortress at Gibraltar.

Gibraltar had been ceded to Britain as a result of internal royal struggles within the Holy Roman Empire. It was a very strategic location and the "Rock of Gibraltar" ( which was forced upward by the tectonic collision between Africa and Europe) was heavily fortified.

The French Bourbon dynasty king and queen, Louis XVI and Marie Antionette who would later be overthrown and executed in the French Revolution, were not pleased at all with a British fortress being in this strategic location and, still resentful over the encouragement and assistance that Britain gave to French Protestants in the destructive religious conflict that engulfed France after the Reformation (and which we saw in "Christmas In Paris"), planned to capture the fortress. But the fortress at Gibraltar proved very difficult to attack by either land or sea.

A French paper manufacturer named Joseph Montgolfier got an idea. Knowing that hot air rises, maybe an especially made "sack" could be constructed that could enable humans to fly by means of heated air flowing into it. That would bring about a new way to attack Gibraltar that would be completely unexpected. The result was the world's first hot air balloon and, for the first time, humans flew through the air.

A balloon was demonstrated on the grounds of Versailles, as we saw in "America And The Modern World Explained By Way Of Paris", and the French king and queen were impressed. Although the aerial attack on Gibraltar never took place, this is what got people flying.

This French tradition of flight is reflected in the Paris Air Show of today, where buyers of military and civilian aircraft come to watch demonstrations of the newest planes, and also in how French-speaking Montreal is Canada's center of aeronautics and aerospace development, and the headquarters of Bombardier. It is also shown in how, when they later became allies, France and Britain built the supersonic airliner the Concorde together. (Ironically, the French king and queen who had got people flying by planning the attack on Gibraltar were executed in Place Concorde).

A later development in flight was the helicopter. As we know, history tends to repeat itself. We tend to reenact history, often without realizing it. A prison is a fortress and a helicopter is a modern incarnation of the first hot air balloon that was originally intended as a means to attack Gibraltar. That is why France, of all countries, has this tradition of prison escapes by helicopter, the latest example of which we saw this week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers#/media/File:1783_balloonj.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_47#/media/File:Bell_47G-5_Uni_Fly,_STA_Stauning,_Denmark_(cropped).png

Most prisons have some kind of courtyard or bailey. This is Attica Prison, in the general area where I live. The lower right quadrant is D-Block, where the 1971 uprising over prison conditions began.

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8495335,-78.2716178,278m/data=!3m1!1e3

I also believe that the historical memory of the balloon taking off up into the sky was the psychological basis for the Eiffel Tower which pioneered modern architecture.

Let's remember how Gibraltar inadvertently got humans flying. Gibraltar is on a peninsula. The land that you can see in the near distance, across water, is mainland Spain. The land that you can see in the far distance, 20 km away, is Morocco. The ancestors of anyone in the western hemisphere who came from the Mediterranean came through this Strait of Gibraltar.

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https://www.google.com/maps/@36.1430477,-5.3513048,3a,75y,312.88h,90t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1s7s-wFCDs3tzzV3XBX51XVw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D7s-wFCDs3tzzV3XBX51XVw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D318.99243%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100

THE STORY OF THE V-WEAPONS

Historians have been mystified as to why the Nazis put so much effort, including the research of their top scientists, into developing the V1 and V2 missiles that were launched at London. The V1 was a jet-powered bomb, the V-2 was a rocket.

But while these two weapons made for a spectacular story, and killed nearly as many people as the Blitz of 1940, their military effect on the course of the war was negligible. After being aimed, the weapons had no guidance systems and, as far as I am aware, no significant military target was ever hit. Historians of the Second World War are virtually unanimous that the Nazis would have been far better off putting the research and effort into weapons that could be used on the battlefront.

The V-weapons were terror weapons but could not be aimed with enough accuracy to be decisive on the battlefield. With the technology of the time, they could only be reliably aimed at a city the size of London.

But what we have to remember is Hitler's sense of history, and of his role in it. What the Nazis were doing above all is attempting to finally fulfill the purpose of the Holy Roman Empire, which was to bring the east back into line with Catholicism as directed by the pope. Charlemagne, Charles the Great, was crowned by the pope as the first Holy Roman Emperor. The effort was unsuccessful and the east ultimately split in 1054, but the Holy Roman Empire lasted for a thousand years, until Napoleon, and had a tremendous effect on history, as we saw in "The Far-Reaching Legacy Of The Holy Roman Empire".

The Nazis referred to themselves as the "Third Reich", and Charlemagne's original empire as the "First Reich". Germany ruled by the kaisers, after unification, was the "Second Reich". Hitler was thus the new Charlemagne, and was gathering Europe back together before confronting the east, which was the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

But later, with the war going badly, the Nazis began a special effort to evoke history. To understand this, we have to realize how important history was to Hitler. If the war was to be won, the Nazis needed the wholehearted support of occupied Europe. The way to get this was to evoke the Holy Roman Empire, and get all of Europe to rally behind the Nazis. This effort was described in detail in the posting on this blog, "The Real Story Of Monte Cassino".

The story of the British fortress at Gibraltar, as described above, took place during the time of the Holy Roman Empire. France was part of the Empire, but Britain was not. It was thus an affront that an outside power held such a strategic position in the Holy Roman Empire, and the idea arose to attack it by way of balloons which was the impetus that got people flying.

We can see what wide-ranging effect this balloon plan had in how it became the foundation of helicopter escapes from French prisons. We can thus be sure that the Nazis were aware of it and this enables us to see the underlying historical basis behind the Nazis' V-weapons that were fired at London.

These weapons were the modern incarnation of the balloons that were developed for the planned aerial assault on Gibraltar, but fired at London itself rather than at Gibraltar. This would evoke history and show that the Nazis were the fulfillment of the Holy Roman Empire, with Hitler as the new Charlemagne, and that all of Europe should rise up and join them.

Hitler is sometimes regarded as inferior to Napoleon as a general, but it must be remembered that Hitler was guided by a sense of the fulfillment of history, and not just by conventional strategy.

Another interesting point is Malta, which was another fortified British possession in the Mediterranean. Although it was not militarily significant at the time of the Second World War, it was relentlessly and heavily bombed, as we saw in the posting on this blog, "Malta And Jerusalem", but yet the Nazis never tried to capture it. It was if they preferred to just keep bombing it.

But this can be explained by Malta being used to evoke history, that the Nazis were the fulfillment of the Holy Roman Empire, and that the aerial attack on British fortresses that never happened as being fulfilled now, as well as the main objective of reconquest of the east.

But it was the V-2 that provided the initial basis for space exploration after the war. There is no set boundary between the earth's atmosphere and outer space but a V-2, at the peak of it's trajectory, could be considered as the first man-made object to enter outer space.

This means that we can consider the fortress at Gibraltar as the impetus for both flight and space exploration.