Lagari Hasan Çelebi was an Ottoman Turk who was the first person to have made a successful, artificially-powered manned rocket flight. This was the first known example of a manned rocket and an artifically-powered aircraft.[1]
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Aviation
According to an eyewitness account given by Evliya Çelebi in the 17th century, Lagari Hasan Çelebi was launched in the air in a seven-winged rocket, which was composed of a large cage with a conical top filled with gunpowder. The flight was accomplished as a part of celebrations performed for the birth of Ottoman Emperor Murad IV's daughter in 1633.[1] Evliya reported that Lagari made a soft landing in the Bosporus by using the wings attached to his body as a parachute after the gunpowder was consumed, foreshadowing the sea-landing methods of astronauts with parachutes after their voyages from outer space. Lagari's flight was estimated to have lasted about twenty seconds and the maximum height reached was around 300 metres. He was rewarded by the sultan with a valuable military position in the Ottoman army.[1] Lagari's brother, Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi, had made a successful glider flight a year earlier. Word of their successful flights soon reached England by 1638, when the flight attempts of Turks were mentioned by John Wilkins in his Discovery of a New World.[1] Lagari died in Crimea under the service of Selamet Giray Khan around 1640.
Popular culture
İstanbul Kanatlarımın Altında (Istanbul Under My Wings, 1996) is a film about the lives of Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi, his brother Lagari Hasan Çelebi, and the Ottoman society in the early 17th century, during the reign of Murad IV, as witnessed and narrated by Evliya Çelebi, the greatest traveler of the Ottoman period whose books provide us most of the knowledge that we have today on the Ottoman cities, provinces and daily life as a whole.
See also
- Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi, brother and aviator
- Evliya Çelebi
- List of Turks
- Inventions in the Muslim world
- Timeline of science and technology in the Islamic world
Notes
References
- Arslan Terzioglu (2007). "The First Attempts of Flight, Automatic Machines, Submarines and Rocket Technology in Turkish History", The Turks (ed. H. C. Guzel), p. 804-810.
- Winter, Frank H. (1992). "Who First Flew in a Rocket?", Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 45 (July 1992), p. 275-80.
