“What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?” So wrote the English cleric William Law in 1728, and in the late 19th century inventors were still struggling to reach the heavens.

Watson Quinby’s 1872 “flying apparatus,” above, was designed to permit the user to grope through the air with actions “resembling those of swimming in water.”

In 1889, Jasper Spalding was emulating a bird rather than a bat with a feathered flying machine designed to be suspended from a balloon (below).

Neither got off the ground … but within one lifetime we had reached the moon.