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Vacuum Voyages: Christiaan Huygens on Francesco Lana’s Flying Machine

In 1670, the Italian Jesuit and natural philosopher Francesco Lana de Terzi (1631–1687) published a collection of preparatory texts dedicated to Leopold I, the Prodromo overo saggio di alcune inventioni nuove, premesso all’arte maestro.[1] Inspired by Gaspar Schott’s 1657 accounts of Otto von Guericke’s famous experiment with the so-called Madgeburg Halbkugeln, it included a chapter where Lana imagined a new flying machine of a most curious design:

 

Fig. 1. Fr. Lana, Prodromo … all’arte maestra, Brescio 1670, Annex.

 

Lana’s idea was to attach four large containers made of copper to a boat-like vessel with both sails or oars. Entirely emptied for air by means of a barometric procedure using water to force out the air, the resulting negative net weight of the containers should then allow the vessel to levitate. In order to ensure that the weight of the containers themselves was not greater than then weight of the air removed by emptying them, they must have exceedingly thin walls. However, if the containers were made spherical, Lana argued, the walls would not collapse under the external pressure because they would be equally compressed from all sides (in the way a cathedral vault upholds great weight; or an egg withstands considerable pressure if applied solely to its bottom and top.) He then set out to demonstrate that the design was “practically applicable.”

 

It is not applicable, of course, as Christiaan Huygens was quick to observe. He considered Lana’s flying machine in some detail in a manuscript from August or September 1678.[2] To explain why he did so, Huygens’s manuscript must be correlated with an entry in the Journal des sçavans of 1678 and two undated letters from Jean-Paul de la Roque, the journal’s editor, presumably also to be dated to 1678. In the issue of the Journal of  31 January 1678, La Roque reviewed de first volume, published in 1676, of Johann Christoph Sturm’s Collegium experimentale, which describes experimental examinations of several major inventions of the century undertaken by the recently established Altdorf academy.[3] And La Roque notes that, among many other things, the volume included a discussion of “Father Lana’s airboat, and several other [inventions] that we will take up separately some other time.”[4] If was likely while considering whether he should indeed take up Lana’s invention again that La Roque wrote Huygens to ask whether it was worth discussing further.[5] Huygens’s reply to La Roque is missing but the Journal des sçavans never returns to Lana’s “airboat.”

 

In making his assessment, Huygens first considered simplifying Lana’s invention. We can see this from little drawings accompanying his text, depicting three different inventions of more modest ambition, one involving several balloons, one with just a single round one, and one with a single oblong one, each with a single person suspended from them:

 

Fig. 2.  Chr. Huygens, Varia Academica 1666–1681, in Oeuvres, XXII, p. 257.

 

Even in these simpler versions without vessel, sails or oars, however, Huygens was not optimistic about the prospects of the invention. An impossible balance between the size and the weight and sturdiness of the spheres would have to be found in order for the spheres to be light enough to keep the vessel levitating, but also sufficiently resistant to withstand external air pressure:

 

The invention of Father Lana for lifting oneself into the air by means of spheres emptied for air, even if well-grounded in theory, suffers from seemingly insurmountable difficulties when it comes to its execution, because of the weight of the material out of which these spheres would have to be made in order to resist the air pressure from the outside.[6]

 

Huygens complained in particular that Lana had not taken into account the fact that a greater sphere would cave more easily under pressure than a smaller one, thus requiring thicker walls: “It seems that he did not consider that the greater the sphere is, the easier it collapses under outside pressure.”[7] Incidentally, Huygens was not happy with the hydraulic-pneumatic mechanical procedure proposed by Lana to empty the spheres of air either.[8]

 

In addition to this, Huygens noted, Lana’s idea was not unprecedented: “Father Lana’s idea, as I could show, has also occurred to others—has been thought of and examined by others in England—although he may well not have been aware of that.”[9] Now, in 1678, the English had known about Lana’s design for a while. The Prodromo had been forwarded to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, shortly after its publication by John Dodington, secretary to the English ambassador in Venice, and it was presented at a Royal Society meeting on 26 January 1671.[10] Huygens, however, seems rather to refer to some similar invention or scheme created independently of Lana. Several possibilities here present themselves without being obvious candidates. First, Huygens had previously reviewed plans for flying machines, most importantly a winged mechanical dragon imagined by Tito Livio Burrattini in 1648:[11]

 

Fig. 3. T. V. Burrattini, in M. Mersenne, Correspondence, XVI, p. 122.[12]

 

Burrattini’s design included a vaguely pneumatic element because it envisaged a security parachute ensuring that the machine would fall slowly to the ground in case the wings broke.[13] But this inventor was not English. Second, an Englishman, namely John Wilkins in his 1648 Mathematical Magick, had published chapters on “volant automata,” “the art of flying,” and a refutation of “the possibility of a flying Chariot.”[14] I have not, however, found evidence that Huygens was familiar with that book. Moreover, neither of these two inventors envisaged containers lighter than air for levitating. So what was Huygens referring to?

 

We find some interesting suggestions in the first volume of the Philosophical Collections, the regular publication that Robert Hooke intended to replace the Philosophical Transactions after Oldenburg’s death.[15] The volume includes two reports on flying machines. One is a flying machine devised by a provincial locksmith named Besnier, described in a letter from Nicolas Toynard included in a December 1678 issue of the Journal des sçavans.[16] The other is the machine described in chapter VI of Lana’s Prodromo. Hooke translates both texts and offers his own remarks.[17] In that context, Hooke first observes generally about the invention of flying machines:

 

We have not wanted late instances even here in England of several Ingenious Men who have employed their wits and time about this Design. Particularly, I have been credibly informed, that one Mr. Gascoyn about forty years since try it with good effect; though he since dying, the thing also dyed with him. And even now there are not wanting some in England, who affirm themselves able to do it, and that they have proved as much by Experiment. / But of all these, we have little or no account of waies they have taken to effect their designe, and therefore conjectures will be much at random; only we may conclude them defective in somewhat or other, since we do not find them brought into common use, which the desirableness and usefulness of any one that should succeed, would certainly cause it to be.[18]

 

Perhaps Gascoyn’s machine was what Huygens also alluded to in his notes on Lana? Since we know nothing of Gascoyn’s design (or indeed about Gascoyn himself), it is hard to determine. Hooke’s text does, however, also provide another, even more promising option:

 

I find Dr. Wilkins, in his discovery of a new World, quotes Albertus de Saxonia, and Francis Mendoça, for the inventors of this opinion, that the Air is Navigable; and that upon this Statick principle, any Brass or Iron vessel whose substance is much heavier than that of the Water, yet being fi’led with the lighter air, it will swim upon it and not sink. … And several Experiments to this purport, were made here in the year 1664. but without the wish’d for success.[19]

 

In most of this passage, Hooke is in fact quoting verbatim from Wilkins’s 1640 Discourse Concerning a New World & Another Planet which explicitly broaches the idea of navigating in the air by means of vessels containing lighter or rarefied air.[20] Hooke adds that experiments to that effect had been tried in England in 1664. At that time, the Royal Society conducted many experiments concerned with the weight and spring of air, but one in particular here seems relevant, namely an “experiment of raising a thin and exhausted glass-bubble from the bottom of the receiver of the compressing engine to the top, by condensing the circumambient air.”[21] This experiment, undertaken numerous times by Hooke himself in January-February 1664, attempted to cause levitation not through the rarefication of the air inside a container, but on the contrary through the compression of the air surrounding it. Notwithstanding, the fundamental principle of levitation is the same as Lana’s.

 

Wilkins’s book of 1640 and the experiments conducted by Hooke at the Royal Society in early 1664 are, I think, the most likely candidates for what Huygens’s referred to when noting that Lana’s invention had already “been thought of and examined by others in England.” But be that as it may, Huygens concluded from the fact that the idea had “also occurred to others” that Lana’s contribution resided less in the invention itself than in the fact that he adduced a concrete design and a bold claim of feasibility:

 

Others have had the same thought as Father Lana concerning the way to fly, but no one has been so bold as to suggest that it could be successful in practice. And, truth be told, the more one examines it, the more one finds that it is impossible not only to construct his flying boat with people in it, but even [to construct] a globe alone which, emptied of air, rises up in the air by itself.[22]

So Lana ought not to have claimed that the airboat could really be built. From the point of view of physics, the whole business was preposterous. Huygens nonetheless saw some value in Lana’s invention if envisaged in a much simpler version and without a view to any specific, practical application:

 

 It would nonetheless be beautiful and rare experiment to construct such a sphere which would elevate itself into the air (and it is by this that one should begin in relation to such a device) that it is quite worthwhile to dream of it and to consider what could be achieved by the joint thinking of several persons who would all contribute each their thoughts.[23]

 

The scheme was useful as a thought experiment that natural philosophers could gather around and examine collectively. Rather than as a blueprint for an actual physical device, it could serve as an intellectual device, something to “dream of,” prompting others to contribute with arguments for and against, new measurements and calculations, and further experimental schemes to explore the basic principles behind the invention. In the event, Lana’s book prompted Huygens himself to envisage a contrived experiment to test the resistance of a greater metal sphere by putting just a segment of it under a vacuum, using a Boylean air pump:[24]

 

 

Fig. 4.  Chr. Huygens, Varia Academica 1666–1681, in Oeuvres, XXII, p. 259.

 

From one perspective, Lana’s invention was for Huygens an utter failure: Lana’s calculations were flawed; he overlooked essential parameters. If built, the thing would not fly. If considered from another perspective as a mere thought experiment, however, Lana’s invention was still useful. Indeed, by shifting perspective from the material realisation to mental representation, the very meaning of the machine changed. It had value as a logical-mechanical puzzle to work on. It was, after all, a “well-grounded in theory” as Huygens put it, and therefore useful as a common topic, i.e. a shared imagination around which natural philosophical discourse—measurements, calculations, arguments, and experimental schemes—could be organised. And Lana’s work did in fact prove quite successful in that second respect. In his early Hypothesis physica nova, written not long after the publication of Lana’s work, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz thus observed that “if anything can be made lighter than air by human art, there is hope of being able to attain the art of flying,” according to the opinion of the “most ingenious Lana” who had envisaged a hollow vessel … so large that the air enclosed within outweighs the container, or the vessel taken by itself.”[25] Moreover, as De La Roque already noted in his review, the Collegium experimentale also took up Lana’s invention and offered elaborate experimental discussion of it,[26] suggesting several additional experiments to explore the principles behind the flying machine. Among other things, in order to illustrate the principle behind the invention “by means of an effect very similar to that more incredible one and easily put into practice,”[27] instead of a flying machine, they considered a vessel held steady under water by means of two floating pontoons, thus using the difference in density between water and air to navigate under water rather than the one between air and empty space to navigate in the air. In short, they imagined a kind of Lana-style submarine:

 

Fig. 5. J. Chr. Sturm, Collegium Experimentale, vol. I, p. 56.

 

 

MOGENS LAERKE

[1] Fr. Terzi de Lana, Prodromo overo saggio di alcune inventioni nuove, premesso all’arte maestra, opera che prepara il P. Fr. Lana (Brescia: Stamperia d. Rizzardi, 1670), chap. VI, p. 52–61. The illustration of the flying machine can be found in the annexes of the work.

[2] Chr. Huygens, Varia Academica 1666–1681, Ms. E. p. 234–7 (August or September 1678), in Chr. Huygens, Œuvres completes (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–1950), XXII, p. 257–60.

[3] J. P. de la Roque, Journal des sçavans 4 (31 January 1678), p. 33–9, esp. p. 34. On Sturm’s text, see below.

[4] Ibid., p. 39.

[5] J. P. de La Roque to Chr. Huygens, 1678 ( ?), Œuvres, XXII, p. 111. See also J. P. de la Roque to Chr. Huygens, 1678 (?), Œuvres, XXII, p. 110.

[6] Huygens, Varia, p. 257.

[7] Ibid., p. 259.

[8] Ibid., p. 259.

[9] Ibid., p. 257.

[10] See Royal Society Meeting, 26 January 1671, in T. Birch, The History of the Royal Society (London: A. Millar, 1656–1657), III, p. 466. Oldenburg first learned of Lana’s book from Dodington in November 1670 and further enquired about it from Travagino and Malpighi. See Dodington to Oldenburg, 25 November 1670, in The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, eds. Alfred Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 13 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press [vol. I–VI]/London: Mansell [vol. X–XI]/London: Taylor & Francis [vol. XII–XIII], 1965–1986), VII, 289; Dodington to Oldenburg, 13 January 1671, VII, p. 381; Dodington to Oldenburg, 4 April 1671, VII, p. 551; Oldenburg to Travagino, 20 December 1670, VII, p. 331; Oldenburg to Malpighi, 20 December 1670, VII, p. 332–3. Malpighi’s reply was on the dismissive side: he had heard “from [Lana’s] servants that he does not possess so acute a judgment as is required, perhaps, for accomplishing what is set out in his Prodromus” (Malpighi to Oldenburg, 31 January 1670/1, VII, p. 330–1). Oldenburg reviewed Lana’s book in “An Account of Two Books,” Philosophical Transactions 6:69 (1671), p. 2114–6, but the review says nothing of flying machine but focuses on Lana’s work in botany. We find one later letter directly from Lana to Oldenburg, written 9 July 1677 (XIII, p. 314–6), where Lana presents himself, mentions his “book published long ago,” and asks if Oldenburg has “observed anything new in Nature.” There is no extant reply from Oldenburg who died just two months later.

[11] The machine is described in an excerpt from a letter to Melchisédech Thévenot, originally sent by Pierre Desnoyers on 29 January 1648 from Warsaw, which Thévenot forwarded to Huygens on 7 May 1661 (Œuvres, III, p. 270). Thévenot’s 1648 correspondent is not identified in Huygens’s correspondence, but Desnoyers sent a longer version of the same letter to Mersenne (M. Mersenne, Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, ed. C. De Waard, R. Pintard, B. Rochot, A. Beaulieu [Paris: PUF and CNRS, 1945–1988], vol. XVI, p. 122–6, esp. p. 123–5). Huygens wrote a reply to Thévenot on 21 July 1661, mentioning some difficulties with the machine, but seems to have not sent it (Œuvres, III, p. 302–3). On the debates about Burrattini’s invention in the circles around Mersenne, including both Constantijn and Christiaan Huygens, but also Roberval and others, see the narrative “How to Fly?” (L. Rouquayrol) in the NOTCOM Database. URL: https://notcom.huma-num.fr/narratives/how-to-fly (consulted 26 June, 2025).

[12] The drawing is Burrattini’s own. For the original, see Mélanges de physique et de mathématiques, comprenant des opuscules et des lettres de P. de Roberval, Huggens, Torricelli, Firmat et Fr. Herman Flayder. BnF lat. 11195, fol. 56r. See BnF Gallica. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10034245m/f32.image.

[13] [Pierre Desnoyers] to Thévenot, 29 January 1648, included in Thévenot to  Huygens, 7 May 1661, Œuvres, III, p. 270: “Le Chapiteau qui est dessus le Dragon en laschant un ressort s’estend fort large et est ainsi fait afin que si en l’air les aisles se rompoient il soustiendroit la Machine par la resistance de l’air qu’elle ne tomberoit que fort doucement.”

[14] L. W. M. A. [= John Wallis], Mathematicall Magick or, The Wonders that may be performed by Mechanicall Geometry (London: Printed by M. F. 1648), Part II, chap. VI-VIIII, p. 191–223.

[15] Thanks to Niall Dilucia for pointing this text out to me.

[16] J. P. de La Roque (ed.), Journal des sçavans 34 (12 December 1678), p. 426–8.

[17] R. Hooke, Philosophical Collections 1 (1679), p. 14–29; incl. p. 15–8 (translation of the letter from Toynard); 18–24 (translation of Lana’s chapter).

[18] Ibid., p. 15. Incidentally, Hooke also notes that flying “was believed possible, and attempted also in the times of our famous Fryar Roger Bacon” who affirmed “that he himself knew how to make an Engine, in which a man sitting, might be able to carry himself through the Air like a Bird” (ibid, p. 14).

[19] Ibid., p. 28.

[20] Cf. John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning a New World & Another Planet in 2 Bookes (London: Printed by John Norton and R. Hearne for John Maynard, 1640), p. 220–1. See also Francisco Mendoça, Viridarium sacræ, ac profanæ eruditionis (Lugduni: Sumptibus, 1632), Book 4, prob. 47, p. 117–8; on p. 117, Mendoça references “Albertus de Sax. lib. 3. physic. quæst. 6, conclusione 3.” I suspect Wilkins simply borrows the reference to Albert from him.

[21] See Royal Society Meeting, 13 January 1664, Birch, History, I, 371. Hooke was instructed to repeat the experiment several times. See the Royal Society Meetings of 27 January 1674, and 3 February 1664, Birch, History, I, 376 and 378.

[22] Huygens, Varia, p. 259.

[23] Ibid., p. 258.

[24] Ibid., p. 259.

[25] G. W. Leibniz, Hypothesis physica nova, Winter 1670/1, in Sämtliche Schiften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie-verlag, 1923–), VI, ii, p. 232–3.

[26] J. C. Sturm, Collegium Experimentale sive Curiosum (Nurumbergæ: Sumtibus Wolfgangi Mauritee Endteri, 1676), Tentamen X, p. 56–66.

[27] Ibid., p. 56.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Mogens Lærke (June 27, 2025). Vacuum Voyages: Christiaan Huygens on Francesco Lana’s Flying Machine. NOTCOM. Retrieved July 16, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1484p


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