Wilkins in Space

Here’s an object lesson in getting your academic work into the papers:

More than 300 years before the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellites and American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon, England had its own ambitious space programme.

That’s the first paragraph from this story in the Independent on Sunday, written by the science editor Steve Connor, about a lecture delivered last night by Professor Allan Chapman at Gresham College.

The ‘ambitious space programme’ turns out to be plans for a spring-powered spacecraft with flapping wings, drawn up by none other than John Wilkins.

Wilkins, who is probably best known these days through the Borges essay, wrote his A Discovery of a World in the Moon in 1638, and added an appendix titled “The possibility of a passage thither” in 1640. I don’t have access to the text to see if it covers all of Professor Chapman’s assertions, but, really, it’s no surprise to anyone that Wilkins was talking spaceships. Two minutes on the web pulls up this Wilkinsism from his moon book:

“I do seriously, and upon good grounds, affirm it possible to make a flying chariot. The perfecting of such an invention would be of such excellent use, that it were enough not only to make a man famous, but the age also wherein he lives. For besides the strange discoveries that it might occasion in this other world, it would be also of inconceivable advantage for travelling, above any other conveyance that is now in use.”

The shame of it is that I wouldn’t have been able to make the lunchtime lecture (’
The Jacobean Space Programme - Wings, springs and gunpowder: flying to the moon from 17th century England’) even if I’d known about it in advance. Pah. Bah. Maybe the newspaper report was a good thing after all.

More on Wilkins:

Aubrey’s Brief Lives (penultimate entry on page)
Wilkins page at the Galileo Project
Wikipedia entry
Wilkins looking inappropriately sceptical