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from a central shaft, was designed to enable the craft to "rise gently from the ground."
NOT all the strange brain-children of the air-minded inventors relied upon motor-power. In 1919, Vincente Rodriguez, of Arizona, patented a device that was to fly by means of the legs of man! His contrivance was an immense propeller attached to a rotating shaft secured to a standard bicycle frame. By pedaling fast enough, the cyclist turned the blade^ lifting the machine into the air. Continued pedal-power carried the "flying bicycle" in flight, height and distance subject only to the stamina of the operator.
Another device propelled by similar power was proposed by a Georgia man, in 1909. This one consisted of a set of large blades rotating on a shaft above a crate-like suspension in which the operator sat, pedals at his feet. The operating gear resembled the helicopter principle, the vertical-screw drive, with the action assured by the pedals that, underfoot, were made to go 'round and 'round.
The year 1909 apparently was an air-minded one throughout the land. In that same year, a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, inventor, named Frederick R. Kummer, patented a "flying bottle." The device was constructed in the shape of a gigantic beer bottle, powered by a motor within the bottle. A shaft, turning the propellor, protruded from the neck of the bottle. Below this was suspended a parachute which opened, in emergency, to slowly waft the whole contraption back to earth.
MUCH earlier, Charles Richard Edouard Wulff, an air-minded inventor of Paris, France, secured an American Letters Patent on a specific means of propelHng and guiding balloons. Wulff explained, in his patent application which was granted in May of 1887, that "attempts to guide and steer aircraft by mechanical, electric, or other motors have (generally) been unsuccessful by reason of the weight of the motor and its accessories." H( proposed a "living motor", comprisec of "one or more eagles, vultures, oi condors", caught and strapped to ; parachute-type device suspended above the structure of the craft. In this way the Frenchman claimed, "the qualitic and powers given by nature to thes most perfect kinds of birds may b completely utilised."
Air Force officials say that som ' of these weird old machines, if buil and flown, could cause the blips oi radar screens that have accompanie< some of the flying saucer report' ^ However, none could attain the ir ^ credible rates of speed attributed t li the saucers. Actually, these example of the hundreds of similar object ;; contained in Patent Office Scare Room files provoke only laughter nov i?