Cyrano was a true Renaissance man—scholar, swordsman, poet, science fiction writer, and engineer(?)!

LOREN E. MOREY

CYRANO de BERGERAC
The First Aerospace Engineer

"My nose!
Know that I glory in this nose of mine,
For a great nose indicates a great man
Genial, courteous, intellectual, Virile, courageous . . ."

So he was, the Cyrano de Bergerac of the drama by Edmond Rostand, first played in Paris on December 28, 1897. It is a story worth telling whenever and wherever men consider themselves less than worthy of what they want most. This Cyrano—there was another one—loved the fair Roxane, but because he was ashamed of his ugly nose, he dared not tell her so. Instead, according to Rostand, he wrote letters and poetry for the handsome but inarticulate Christian because Roxane had confided that she loved the younger man.
In one scene of Rostand's play, Cyrano delays the villainous de Guiche by reciting seven ways to reach the Moon, while Roxane and Christian escape. Despite his disbelief, de Guiche is fascinated by Cyrano's bit of science fiction. Before he can break the spell, Roxane and Christian are married. In these lines Rostand, dramatizing the life of the Seventeenth Century author and philosopher, admitted that there was a second Cyrano—author of the first story about a rocket-powered flight to the Moon.
Savinien Cyrano, the son of a poor lawyer, was born in Paris about 1620. Three years later the family moved to their small estate of Bergerac, the name that Cyrano adopted and used in one form or another throughout his life. At the age of thirteen Cyrano was sent to school in Paris. In the five years he spent at the College de Beauvais, Cyrano acquired a well-rounded education in the new humanism. After two years in a company of guards, he returned to a life of study at the College de Lisieux where he attended the classes of Pierre Gassendi, one of the philosophers and mathematicians whose informal meetings led to the formation of the French Academy of Science. Thus, Cyrano was privileged to witness the birth of science as an investigative discipline.
The scholars do not agree on whether Cyrano was the model of chivalry, as Rostand made him, or a vain, ill-tempered gambler and tavern brawler. Perhaps he was both. He refused the patronage of a rich noble because he wanted to remain a free man, but only because he had robbed his father as the old man lay dying and was, for the moment, less impoverished than usual. He fought many duels as a second but never for his own quarrels. It was probably not his large nose but his syphilis that kept him from the opposite sex. Cyrano seems to have mixed a thorough study of the current scientific ideas with a dissolute way of life.
Cyrano's story of a trip to the Moon, written in about 1650, was not in the usual vein for medieval space travel. Lucian of Samos, in the Second Century A.D., had transported his hero to the Moon by a waterspout or, in a second book, on a pair of wings. Johannes Kepler used better judgment in the early Seventeenth Century; witchcraft was the plausible means for getting from Earth to our satellite. Bishop Godwin, writing in 1638, used trained swans that just happened to be of a species that migrated to the Moon. Cyrano realized that powered flight was the proper means for celestial travel.
Cyrano was up-to-date in knowledge of the science of his day. He knew that a "spyglass" could be used to enlarge the features of the Moon, a feat that Galileo had announced in 1610. He had read theworks of Copernicus and Kepler. He could also invent what might have been the first wire recorder. He was familiar with magnets, spring-powered clocks and fireworks. He may have traveled to England, Italy and Poland, where he saw experiments with a flying machine.
Describing his means of travel to the Moon was only secondary to his real purpose, that of stating his belief in the new humanism; but Cyrano did hit upon the use of rockets, and thus was the first writer to make use of the only practical means for space travel known to the Twentieth Century. Cyrano even invented propulsion staging, although his second stage was pure fantasy. His tale of how Elijah rose to the Moon by throwing a loadstone might be the first description of an antigravity machine—well before Newton described the natural force. On a later flight to the Sun, Cyrano used a ramjet. In all, Cyrano de Bergerac was the first of the Moon travelers to use mechanical power for flight and for that deserves his niche in the aerospace hall of fame.
Cyrano was more of an engineer in his original book than Rostand allowed him to be in the play. Since today's writers of popular aerospace histories seem to rely on the playwright's version, it seems only fair to credit him with what knowledge of space flight he had and to retell it as it was.

Cyrano and several companions were returning home one night after being entertained by a friend on an estate just outside Paris. The year was 1648—or thereabouts—and the country sky was neither cloudy nor besmirched by smog. The moon was full, and the party had several miles to walk. All eyes were attracted by the "ball of saffron" in the sky. Since this was before the day of rapid transit, there was time for speculation about the nature of the moon.
All views, except Cyrano's, reflected a belief in a finite universe that was enveloped by a solid firmament: the moon was some phenomenon of the huge sphere that surrounded the Earth. One of the party, perhaps somewhat inebriated, thought it to be a tavern sign. One, with quiet sense of humor, assured the sauntering group that the moon was the copper ironing board on which Diana pressed Apollo's collars. A third thought it was the sun itself, spying on nocturnal man through a peephole in the firmament. The last of Cyrano's companions, no doubt the religious friend, was sure that the moon was a window in the sky through which Heaven could be glimpsed. Yet all laughed when Cyrano offered his views.
Our hero stated flatly that "the moon is a world like ours which our world serves as a moon." He added, "And that, perhaps, is just how someone else is being ridiculed at this very moment in the moon for maintaining that this globe here is a world." Cyrano drove home his point further by informing the party that some of the ancient Greeks, as well as astronomers of their own age, Copernicus and Kepler, were of the same opinion.

This bold statement of the new astronomy provoked not only derisive contradiction but an argument that lasted long into the night, only ending when the moon had set and the sun rose to take its place. In defending his view, Cyrano became more sure than ever that he was right. On arriving home, he chanced to read from an old book supposedly telling of a visit to the author by two lunar inhabitants. Thinking that it was a miracle to find such a passage in a book that he could not even remember taking from the shelf, Cyrano resolved to settle the whole question by going to the Moon.

If the Moon was indeed "another world," it would be made of good solid dirt for the space traveler to stand on. Less than forty years before Cyrano wrote of space travel, Galileo had seen the rugged mountains of the Moon through his telescope. With that observation the Italian had given purpose to space travel. Perhaps forests grew on the mountains and rivers went down to the seas. It might be, then, the Moon was a better world than Earth.
It was not difficult to imagine that the Garden of Eden was on the Moon.
Cyrano's friends were merely stating the accepted views of the times, for the Seventeenth Century was not a time of ready acceptance of new discoveries or ideas. Galileo wrote to Kepler, "Here at Padua is a principal professor of philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do." Indeed, there was active opposition to any new thoughts. One learned professor said, "You have made me see this business so plainly and sensibly that, did not the text of Aristotle assert the contrary—I should be constrained to confess your opinion to be true."
That the Moon is another Earth may be old hat to Twentieth Century man, but it was a radical view in the mid-Seventeenth Century. Cyrano, believing it himself, could write an interesting story about a walk on the Moon.
Now Cyrano offered himself up to heaven. All about his body he fastened small bottles filled with dew. He had found it appropriate to retire to an isolated country place for liftoff. There is no dew in the city and the fields of a large farm would be required for harvesting the amount Cyrano required. When the sun beat upon the vials it attracted the dew so that Cyrano rose until he found himself in the middle region of the air. He seemed to be going too fast and in the wrong direction. Cyrano broke several of the little bottles to slow down, but he also wanted to change direction. Thus, Cyrano invented space maneuvering and velocity control. Unfortunately, as so often happens with first-time experiments, Cyrano overcorrected and fell back to Earth.
There is very little to be said about this method of space travel except to apologize. We should, in fairness to Cyrano, point out that he was writing well in advance of the acceptance of atomic theory and an understanding of evaporation. That the sun draws up the morning dew or mists is an old belief. Who has not seen a misted shaft of sunlight slanting down through a dark storm cloud and been told that the sun was drawing up the water? Cyrano believed that evaporation was caused by an attraction between sunlight and water. Since the glass bottles were transparent, they did not interfere. As the dew was lifted, so would be our hero.
Cyrano was anticipating the hot air balloons of Joseph and Jacque Montgolfier by almost one hundred and fifty years. The brothers had observed the suspension of clouds in the sky. It occurred to them that if they could enclose in a bag any vapor such as a cloud, it would rise and carry the bag with it. On June 5, 1783 they inflated a large linen bag with smoke from burning straw to demonstrate the first balloon. When released, it arose to a great height and traveled about one and a half miles before descending. That their balloon contained hot air as well as smoke was chance. Cyrano should be given the credit for first trying lighter-than-air craft.
When Cyrano landed back on Earth, he was surprised to find it still midday when it should have been midnight. The natives told him that he was in French Canada, a distance of perhaps thirty-four hundred miles from Paris. It was a flight record not broken until October 1928 by lighter-than-air craft when the Graf Zeppelin crossed the Atlantic Ocean in four days, fifteen hours and forty-six minutes. As for speed, Cyrano held the record until April 26, 1939 when Captain Fritz Wendel flew his aircraft 469.22 miles an hour.
Not resting on his laurels, Cyrano resolved to try again. After a night as a guest of the Governor he went to the top of a small hill and built a flying machine. He reported very little of the design except that it contained "the device of the spring" and that "the motor was agitating its great wings."

The Soldiers Added Strap-On Rockets

Cyrano's start was not entirely impractical. The earliest attempts to fly had relied on wings attached to the arms or legs, but by the Seventeenth Century it was recognized that a lightweight power source was needed. The coiled spring had been used to drive mechanical clocks since the Fifteenth Century. Robert Hooke began experimenting with flying machines as early as 1655 and by 1660 had a spring-powered model that lifted itself in the air. Scale-up to Cyrano's size is an accepted aerospace engineering procedure.
Despite its ingenuity the huge locust was not flightworthy, and Cyrano tumbled into the valley. Undaunted, he returned to his room, greased himself with beef marrow for his aches and comforted his heart with a bottle of cordial. Then he set out to recover his machine. Soldiers had carried it to the marketplace where they had added strap-on rockets. (The credit that is usually given to Cyrano for first conceiving of rocket power for space travel should go to some unknown and unnamed Canadian soldier.) Cyrano, attempting to prevent their ignition, found himself launched. The rockets were properly staged. When one bank of six burned out, another line was ignited.

The soldiers had intended to make the flying machine look like a dragon breathing fire and smoke. The rocket, in Cyrano's day, was only an amusement piece. When Henry VIII of England met Francis I of France on the field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, part of the entertainment was "a great salamander or dragon, artificially constructed; it was four fathoms long, and seemed to be filled with fire, very horrible and terrible." It traveled "with an undulating motion, as fast as a foot soldier could travel, as far as Guisnes, mounting as high in the air as a crossbow would carry an arrow."
Cyrano de Bergerac was on his way to the Moon, yet his rocket machine was only first-stage propulsion. It was well known in the Seventeenth Century that the Moon (Diana) on the wane, "draws forth to fill her crescent horn, the marrow of bulls and goats." Thus, the beef marrow that Cyrano had used to soothe his battered body was pulling him to the Moon. If this was nonsense even in the Seventeenth Century, at least it had the attributes of sound aerospace principles for upper-stage propulsion: high specific impulse and low inert weight.
One can imagine the launched Cyrano headed for the Moon with his nose in the lead, arms flattened against his sides and body straight as a Saturn rocket. When he had traveled about three-fourths of the way from Earth to Moon he found himself falling headfirst, although he had not somersaulted in any fashion. He noticed the change because he felt the weight of his body on his head. Cyrano reasoned that the Moon, "being smaller than our Earth, must have a less extensive sphere of influence, and in consequence I have felt the pull of its center later."
The null point of the Earth-Moon gravitational field is nearly five-sixths of the distance from our planet to the Moon, so Cyrano's estimate was reasonably accurate. More doubtful is that a Moon tree could have cushioned his landing, but it did. Cyrano recovered consciousness to find himself entangled in two or three large branches that had been broken off by his impact. Climbing down, he soon met the prophet Elijah, who told him that others had preceded him.
Elijah had made a light chariot of iron, then extracted in a furnace the attractive principle from a loadstone and reduced it to a medium-sized ball. When he cast the ball into the air, the iron chariot was attracted upwards. Repeated throws carried him to the gravitational field of the Moon. He maneuvered to a satisfactory landing site by casting the ball horizontally. Finally, an upward toss of the ball reduced his fall to that no more violent than a jump.
Enoch had sealed the vapor of a sacrifice in two large metal vessels, attached them under his armpits and was carried aloft by the tendency of smoke to rise. On reaching the Moon, Enoch released the vessels and descended to the surface gently when the ample skirts of his robe served as a parachute.
Cyrano also met Dominique Gonsales, the hero of Bishop Godwin's "Man in the Moone," which was first published in 1638. Gonsales had made his journey in a flying machine lifted by gansas, a type of swan that migrated between Earth and the Moon. This was not an incredible scheme to an age when the migration of birds was little understood. Homing pigeons have flown an estimated seven thousand miles and the bar-headed goose regularly migrates over Mount Everest.
Cyrano returned to Earth as honorless as any other prophet, was counted as a demon and madman and in league with the devil. One accuser said, "I never saw a sorcerer but had dealings with the Moon." Eventually jailed in a high tower, he planned to escape by building a new propulsion device and journeying to the Sun.
For eight days, he hammered, planed and glued to build a six-foot-high and three-foot-wide box that shut very tightly. The craft had holes in the bottom and over the roof. The neck of a crystal vessel in the shape of an icosahedron fitted exactly at and in the hole in the top of the box. The twenty facets of the vessel were convex-concave to serve as condensers of the sun's rays. The box had four ports in the vertical sides for observation. It was equipped with a wind clock, an artificial eye to see at night and a planetarium. A small, very light plank served for a seat. Cyrano steered the box with a string attached to a small sail.
When the sun shone on the transparent icosahedron and its rays were focused in the box, the air was rarefied. More air rushed in through the bottom hole and out the top, lifting Cyrano and his space box. Earlier chronicles have credited Cyrano with inventing the ramjet for his last space venture. If true, it is certainly an advanced type. The flow is opposite to that of the Twentieth Century ramjet. The flight to the Sun was successful so his engineering cannot be criticized.
What Cyrano said and heard on the Moon and Sun will be found in "Other Worlds," from which these aerospace facts have been extracted. The book was first published two years after his death, but private circulation had made him famous while he was still alive. It may have caused his death in 1655, if the story is true that Cyrano died of foul play when the agents of the Church caused a wooden beam to fall on his head. Or perhaps he died of the venereal disease he had contracted ten years before.
So we have uncovered another Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac. The first was the poet, duelist and pathetic lover of Rostand's play. The second was the brilliant scholar who, although well-read in the emerging science of the Seventeenth Century, would poke fun at those who strove to understand it. The third Cyrano belongs to the aerospace age 

REFERENCES 
1) Rostand, Edmond, Cyrano de Bergerac, Carlton House, New York, 1923.
2) Bergerac, Cyrano de, Other Worlds, Oxford University Press, London, 1965.
3) Long, Lumon H., The World Almanac, Newspaper Enterprise Assoc. Inc., New York, 1971.
4) McWhinter, Norris and Ross, Guiness Book of World Records, Bantam Books; New York, 1966.
5) Encyclopedia Britannica, "Balloons."
6) Ley, Willy, Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, The Viking Press, New York, 1952.
7) Usher, Abbott Payson, A History of Mechanical Inventions, McGraw Hill, New York, 1929.
8) Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Voyages to the Moon, Macmillan, New York, 1960.
9) Fenton, Edward, Fireworks, Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, October, 1954.
10) Swan, Lawrence W., Goose of the Himalayas Natural History, December, 1970.