{ "id": "cosme-bueno-disertacion-arte-de-volar", "type": "entity", "name": "The Disertación sobre el arte de volar, a Lima referee's report on a proposal to carry the mail by air", "summary": "When a man of no standing offered the government of Peru to keep despatches moving through the air during a war with Britain, the chief cosmographer was ordered to report, and then wrote a dissertation to settle the public argument. It contains a wing-loading calculation, a muscle-mass argument, an account of the tail as a control surface and a description of clothing acting as a parachute - and it concludes that flight is providentially impossible, and would be wicked if it were not.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "science", "physics", "aeronautics", "peru", "lima", "eighteenth-century", "enlightenment", "books" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "cosme-bueno" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "cosme-bueno-descripcion-de-las-provincias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "juan-de-la-cierva" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "correos-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mercurio-peruano-1791" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "feijoo-mapa-intelectual-1728" } ], "questions": [ "What was the Disertación sobre el arte de volar?", "Did anyone in colonial Spanish America study human flight?", "What arguments were made against human flight before the balloon?", "Who proposed to carry the mail by air in eighteenth-century Peru?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The occasion is stated in the first sentences. The governor of Buenos Aires having attempted to dislodge the English from their establishment at Port Egmont in the Malvinas islands \"ahora mas de 20 años\", Great Britain declared war; and since the regular communication of the kingdom with the metropolis would consequently be disturbed, a subject \"de bajo caracter, aunque no de bajo ingenio y habilidad\" proposed to the superior government that he would shortly continue it through the air, carrying despatches to and fro with much benefit to the king and to the public. He pressed the matter repeatedly, despising the risk that was evident to everyone.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "What follows is a referee's report turned into a public paper. The Superior Government ordered the author to report, and he says he then gave the opinion that seemed to him most rational. The public being disturbed by the news, some inclined to believe the proposer because of the great confidence with which he assured them he would put it into practice and exposed himself to the danger, others full of a thousand doubts and entirely opposed to its execution, he wrote the dissertation to undeceive them all - in two parts, the first pressing as hard as he could the possibility of flying on the grounds generally used by those who have attempted to navigate the air, the second setting out the grounds of the authors who deny it.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Neither the proposer's name nor a date appears in the printed text. The piece as reprinted carries only the heading \"DISERTACION Sobre el Arte de Volar\", is attributed to Cosme Bueno by the title and index of the volume that contains it, and dates itself solely by the phrase placing the Malvinas episode more than twenty years back, which puts the writing well after the report to government rather than at the moment of it. This object therefore names no proposer and asserts no year.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The first part opens with a definition of impossibility that is worth the space it takes. Not everything that seems impossible at first sight is: what is generally impossible is that which encloses two ideas which contradict and destroy each other, a mountain without a valley, a square circle. But what contradiction is there in a man flying? Though it is certain that flight is impossible to his natural constitution and figure, which nature in no way gave him for that purpose - he stands towards it as a stone does - with his understanding and his industry he can overcome a natural impossibility by inventing an art which, imitating nature, makes it feasible; as men learned to swim by taking their example from fish.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The argument then becomes quantitative, and disposes of the objection everybody makes. It is commonly said that the body of man is very heavy; to which the reply is, first, that it is also heavier than water and yet does not sink; and second, that in the great family of birds a condor or vulture flies just as well as a swallow, the ratio between their weights being 500 to 1 - supposing the vulture at 32 pounds and the swallow at an ounce. The difficulty therefore does not come from weight but from the wings and from their size relative to the weight; and if there are wings that sustain 32 pounds, may not wings be made large and artificial enough to sustain the 150 that a man usually weighs? That is stated as the first difficulty of the subject, not as its answer.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The case for possibility is then supported by the history of machines: the artificial celestial machine said to have been made by Archimedes and seen again in our times; an artificial horse in the Journal des Sçavans of 1680, capable of a journey of four leagues on level ground; an iron figure made by a captive which walked out of a dungeon and, not in a straight line, into the presence of the king of Morocco, knelt and presented a petition; the dove of Archytas at Tarentum, which flew for a good while by a hidden spring and descended without any fall; and the works of Vaucanson, academician of the royal academy of sciences of Paris, whose human figure of almost the height of a man played the flute admirably and whose duck ate and digested.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The decisive mechanical argument is about power, not lift, and it is close to right. The muscles with which birds move their wings are a sixth part of the weight of their body while a man's are not; so to fly either his must be increased or his gravity diminished until they stand in the same proportion. Flight, the argument runs, is made by leaps with the wings, insisting with their action on the air, whose support could not be softer - and birds continue these for many hours without trouble or fatigue, which a man cannot do even on hard ground without weakening at each repetition until he is left motionless. Until an art is found of increasing a man's muscles so that they are a sixth part of the weight of his body, and can exercise a force ten thousand times greater than the resistance of his weight, the art of flying will not be attained, \"que es lo mismo que ser imposible\".", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "Control, not only lift, is treated. The tail of fishes is vertical and they steer with it from side to side; birds have theirs horizontal, and when they bend it downwards in motion the air striking it makes the bird lose its equilibrium and incline its course downward, when they direct it upwards it makes the bird climb, and when it is moved obliquely to one side the bird changes direction to the opposite part; this tail is regularly a quarter of the length of the bird's body. Birds also place their light legs horizontally beneath the tail, whereas the flying man, whose legs and feet are relatively very heavy, would be obliged to carry them hanging, which would not only destroy his equilibrium but, the air striking them, would turn his body head downwards.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The paper also separates gliding from flight, and records the parachute effect while doing it. Of the many who are said to have flown, it answers that they did not fly in the sense under discussion: what those in the histories did, if the facts are true, was to come down from a certain height to the flat by a more or less oblique direction, which properly should be called a descent and not a flight; some have even fallen perpendicularly without receiving all the harm expected, because their own clothes, spreading out in the air during the fall, retarded the acceleration by their resistance. Properly to fly is to keep in the air a long time, to gain a height greater than the place from which one starts, to steer straight, oblique or circular and to descend at will. The machines invented for it are so unmeasuredly large and cumbersome that they can only serve to punish the audacity of those who practise them, as has been seen in those who have unhappily tried to use them; and the model of Burattini's flying machine has remained a model.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "Where the mechanics stop, a moral argument takes over, and this is the part a favourable summary would leave out. Citing the pious author of the Spectacle de la Nature, the dissertation argues that if there were a way for men to cross the air there would be no door shut against concupiscence and revenge; houses would become theatres of murders and thefts; how should we be delivered from enemies who by day and night held it in their hand to surprise us, or keep our goods against a troop of robbers provided with good arms to force our houses and good wings to escape with the theft; the art would change the face of the earth, obliging us to abandon the towns and seek refuge in the hollows of rocks. And then, in the writer's own voice: it seems to me that if there were one who attained this impossible, he ought to be thrown out of the world before he propagated so fatal and pernicious an art.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The conclusion is providential and it is unambiguous. There is nothing to fear, the paper ends, because God, by an effect of his wise and beneficent Providence, set for our preservation between our element and that of the birds an invincible boundary, an impregnable wall, which they will never destroy however many machines industry and power invent; let men be content with the place the Supreme Creator distributed to them and not covet vain and impossible enterprises, since those who spend their efforts in trying to conquer this impossibility will always manifest their senselessness and their illusion. A tag from Lucretius closes the piece. Earlier in the same passage the writer had listed, after Fontenelle, the chimera of each science - the universal remedy in medicine, the philosopher's stone in chemistry, the squaring of the circle in geometry, the fixed point of longitude in navigation, perpetual motion in mechanics - and added the flight of men to the list.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The paper concedes the motive of the man it is refusing. The desire to fly must be as old as the desire to imitate nature, and to it should be added its utility: to make a journey in a short time, to carry an important notice, to avoid an enemy, to forestall a misfortune, and a hundred other things ought to have excited men, sparing neither cost nor labour, to invent an art of flying. The complaint that follows is that all other arts, even those whose object is taste and diversion, have advanced greatly and some seem to have reached their total perfection, while this one has not begun its apprenticeship - because all the others imitate nature without pretending to overcome her laws, and this one wants to suppose them insufficient and establish new ones.", "sources": [ "odriozola-documentos-literarios-peru-t3-cosme-bueno" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Pre-balloon writing on human flight is reached in English through Borelli, Bacon and the London virtuosi; that a viceregal government in South America commissioned a technical opinion on an air-mail proposal, and that the resulting paper survives, is almost unreported. What this object puts on the page is the reasoning itself, in the order the author used it: the definition of impossibility, the vulture-to-swallow ratio of 500 to 1 that disposes of weight as the obstacle, the flight muscles at a sixth of body weight that reinstates it as a power problem, the tail at a quarter of body length working as a control surface, the distinction between a descent and a flight, and the observation that spread clothing retards a fall. And then the half that a celebratory account would drop: the conclusion is that flight is impossible by Providence, that the arts should not pretend to overcome nature's laws, and that anyone who did achieve it should be thrown out of the world before he could teach it. Both halves are quoted here from the same pages, which is the only way the first half can be believed.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-13", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/cosme-bueno-disertacion-arte-de-volar", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/cosme-bueno-disertacion-arte-de-volar.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The Disertación sobre el arte de volar, a Lima referee's report on a proposal to carry the mail by air", "description": "When a man of no standing offered the government of Peru to keep despatches moving through the air during a war with Britain, the chief cosmographer was ordered to report, and then wrote a dissertation to settle the public argument. It contains a wing-loading calculation, a muscle-mass argument, an account of the tail as a control surface and a description of clothing acting as a parachute - and it concludes that flight is providentially impossible, and would be wicked if it were not.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/cosme-bueno-disertacion-arte-de-volar", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-13", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Disertaciones geográficas y científicas del doctor Cosme Bueno, in Coleccion de documentos literarios del Peru, tomo tercero", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=HVvGwzUrUOgC&pg=PA11" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Disertación sobre el arte de volar, a Lima referee's report on a proposal to carry the mail by air" } }