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Swedenborg's flying saucer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

Clive Hart
Clive Hart*
Affiliation:
Department of Literature, University of Essex
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Extract

As early as 1714, when he was 26, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) showed an interest in the possibility of building a flying machine. Writing from Rostock on 8th September 1714 to his brother-in-law Erik Benzelius, he ambitiously listed 14 inventions which he had under way and about which he had prepared manuscript notes. The projected inventions included ‘a kind of flying chariot, or the possibility of being sustained in the air and of being carried through it’. Two years later, in 1716, Swedenborg founded Sweden's first scientific journal, Daedalus Hyperboreus, in the fourth number of which he anonymously published a short article entitled ‘Utkast til en Machine at flyga i wädret’ (Sketch of a Machine for Flying in the Air).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Aeronautical Journal , Volume 84 , Issue 836 , September 1980 , pp. 282 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1980 

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References

1. Swedenborg, Emanuel. Opera quaedam aut Inedita aut obsoleta de rebus naturalibus I , ed. Stroh, Alfred H., Holmiae, p 226, 1907.Google Scholar
2. Daedalus Hyperboreus IV 80-83, October-December 1716.Google Scholar
3.Stiftsbibliothek, Linköping, Codex 14a.Google Scholar
4.See the following translations and commentaries: Carl Th. Odhner, Swedenborg's Flying Machine, New Church Life 29.10 582-91, October 1909; Hugo Lj. Odhner and Carl Th. Odhner, Suggestions for a Flying Machine, Philadelphia, 1910, reprinted in part in The Aeronautical Journal 14, 118-22, July 1910; Transactions of the International Swedenborg Congress, London, 45-46, 1910; Acton, Alfred, The Mechanical Inventions of Emanuel Swedenborg, Philadelphia, 20–26, 1939; Machine att flyga i Wädret enligt utkast av Emanuel Swedenborg, Stockholm, translation reprinted from Acton, 1960.Google Scholar
5.Swedenborg's unit of length is the ell (= approx 2 ft); his unit of weight is the lispund (= 18·75 lb).Google Scholar
6.Flap valves for wings are sketched in Codice Atlantico, f. 309 v-b (1487-90).Google Scholar
7. See Hart, Clive. Burattini's flying Dragon. The Aeronautical Journal, Vol 83, pp 269-73, July 1979.Google Scholar
8.In the printed version he says that the event occurred at Strängnäs.Google Scholar
9. Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Providence (1764) 1.20, London, pp 16–17, 1949; translated from the Latin for the Swedenborg Society.Google Scholar
10. The Apocalypse Revealed (1766) 2 vols, section 245 (Vol I, pp 216, 217), London, 1970; translated from the Latin for the Swedenborg Society.Google Scholar
11. The Apocalypse Revealed, section 561 (Vol II, p 533).Google Scholar