1633: First Successful Manned Rocket Flight

Credit: wowTurkey.com

Evliya Çelebi also wrote of Lagari’s brother, Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi, making a flight by glider a year earlier. with levitating.

Istanbul Beneath My Wings is a film about the lives of Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi, his brother Lagari Hasan Çelebi, and Ottoman society in the early 17th century as witnessed and narrated by Evliya Çelebi. 

The legend was addressed in an experiment by the television show MythBusters, on November 11, 2009, in the episode “Crash and Burn”; however, the rocket constructed for the TV show did not adhere closely to Evliya Çelebi’s description, and the final design did not attempt to utilize period materials

The First Rockets Developed By The Chinese

Rockets for military and recreational uses date back to at least 13th century China.  The availability of black powder (gunpowder) to propel projectiles was a precursor to experiments as weapons such as bombs, cannon, incendiary fire arrows and rocket-propelled fire arrows. The discovery of gunpowder was probably the product of centuries of alchemical experimentation in which Taoist alchemists were trying to create an elixir of immortality that would allow the person ingesting it to become physically immortal. However, anyone with a wood fire would have observed the acceleration of combustion that accidentally-chosen saltpetre-containing rocks would have produced.

Exactly when the first flights of rockets occurred is contested. Merely lighting a centimeter-sized solid lump of gunpowder on one side can cause it to move via reaction (even without a nozzle for efficiency), so confinement in a tube and other design refinements may easily have followed for the experimentally-minded with ready access to saltpeter.

A problem for dating the first rocket flight is that Chinese fire arrows can be either arrows with explosives attached, or arrows propelled by gunpowder. There were reports of fire arrows and ‘iron pots’ that could be heard for 5 leagues (25 km, or 15 miles) when they exploded, causing devastation for a radius of 600 meters (2,000 feet), apparently due to shrapnel. A common claim is that the first recorded use of a rocket in battle was by the Chinese in 1232 against the Mongol hordes at Kai Feng Fu. However, the lowering of iron pots there may have been a way for a besieged army to blow up invaders. A scholarly reference occurs in the Ko Chieh Ching Yuan (The Mirror of Research), states that in 998 AD a man named Tang Fu invented a fire arrow of a new kind having an iron head.

Less controversially, one of the earliest devices recorded that used internal-combustion rocket propulsion, was the ‘ground-rat,’ a type of firework recorded in 1264 as having frightened the Empress-Mother Kung Sheng at a feast held in her honor by her son the Emperor Lizong.

Subsequently, one of the earliest texts to mention the use of rockets was the Huolongjing, written by the Chinese artillery officer Jiao Yu in the mid-14th century. This text also mentioned the use of the first known multistage rocket, the ‘fire-dragon issuing from the water’ (huo long chu shui), used mostly by the Chinese navy