Lagari Hasan Çelebi

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Lagari Hasan Çelebi was an Ottoman Turk who was the first person to have made a successful, artificially-powered manned rocket flight. This was the first known example of a manned rocket and an artificially-powered aircraft.[1]

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[edit] Aviation

According to an eyewitness account given by Evliya Çelebi in the 17th century, Lagari Hasan Çelebi was launched in the air in a winged rocket which was composed of a large cage with a conical top filled with gunpowder. The flight was accomplished as a part of celebrations performed for the birth of Ottoman Emperor Murad IV's daughter in 1633. Lagari made a soft landing in the Bosporus by using wings attached to his body after the gunpowder was consumed, foreshadowing the sea-landing methods of astronauts. He was rewarded by the sultan with a cavalry commission.[1]

Lagari's brother, Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi, had made a successful glider flight a year earlier. Word of their successful flights soon reached England by 1638, when the flight attempts of Turks were mentioned by John Wilkins in his Discovery of a New World.[1]

Lagari died in Crimea under the service of Selamet Giray Khan around 1640.

[edit] Popular culture

İstanbul Kanatlarımın Altında (Istanbul Under My Wings, 1996) is a film about the lives of Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi, his brother Lagari Hasan Çelebi, and the Ottoman society in the early 17th century, during the reign of Murad IV, as witnessed and narrated by Evliya Çelebi, the greatest traveler of the Ottoman period whose books provide us most of the knowledge that we have today on the Ottoman cities, provinces and daily life as a whole.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Terzioglu (2007)

[edit] References

  • Arslan Terzioglu (2007). "The First Attempts of Flight, Automatic Machines, Submarines and Rocket Technology in Turkish History", The Turks (ed. H. C. Guzel), p. 804-810.
  • Winter, Frank H. (1992). "Who First Flew in a Rocket?", Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 45 (July 1992), p. 275-80.
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