Early Rocket History - The Greeks and the Romans
The earliest rockets can be traced back to the society of
the Ancient Greeks. These early rocket engines were primarily based on
propulsive gases, and were not rockets in the way rockets are thought of today.
If Roman accounts of Greek life are to be believed, the very first rocket like
propulsion system was a steam based one, which existed as a part of a wooden
bird that existed mostly as a device for entertainment. Aulus Gaellus, a Roman,
wrote of a Greek named Archytas, who lived in Tarentum, a Greek city that
exists in what is now southern Italy. Around 400 BC, it was recorded that
Archytas had developed a wooden pigeon that flew by utilizing escaping steam . Hero of Alexandria, a few centuries later, also utilized steam
propulsion in a manner reminiscent of today’s rockets. His device, known as the
aeolipile, consisted of a hollow sphere that was connected by pipes to an open
kettle of water. When the water was heated by a fire below, the steam generated
went through pipes to the sphere, then escaped out of small L-shaped pipes that
faced opposite directions on the sphere (this invention is shown to the left). Though these two
proto-rockets may not fit the present idea of what a rocket is, and indeed, in
the first instance, may have been apocryphal, they are important to be aware of, as
they are the first instances of the powered propulsion and reaction principle
that form the basic concepts of the rockets that transport people and other
payloads into space today.
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