The first real aircraft heavier than air rose up only at the end of the XVIII century, a little over two hundred years ago. In the summer of 1783, the brothers Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier invented a method of lifting an inflatable balloon using warm air. The idea of the brothers was supported by Zh. Charles, who guessed to soak the silk shell of the ball with varnish, which allowed it to be filled with hydrogen. In September 1783, for the first time in the air were raised living creatures: a ram, a duck and a rooster - just like in our time before the launch of the first people into space!.. And already on November 21, in the basket (gondola) of the balloon, two people took to the air, flying 8 kilometers downwind over Paris. Louis XVI highly appreciated the invention of his countrymen:

he awarded the Montgolfier brothers a noble title with the inscription on the coat of arms: "Sic itur ad astral" (So go to the stars!).

A new era in human history has begun.

Aero stats

Officially, the first balloon aircraft (there were no others for about 100 years!) were given the Latin name machina aerostati-ca (a device standing [hanging] in the air) or simply - balloon (in French. The first public demonstration of balloons in St. Petersburg took place in the same year 1783, and in Moscow (not very successfully) - on Shrovetide 1784. The first Russian balloon with scientific purposes was raised in the summer of 1804. Academician Y. D. Zakharov supervised the ascent.

From the French language to Russian during the last decade of the XVIII century, the words aerostat, aerostatics (and aerostatic), aerostate actively entered? (the" pilot " of the balloon). Aerostatics was then called the occupation of making and launching balloons (A magazine of various subjects of literature. 1805. Book 3).

The second basis is stat (from the Greek statos - standing) turned out to be

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quite productive, and at different times several new words were created according to this scheme: vertostat (a hybrid of a helicopter and an airship, 1981), galvanostat (and galvanostatics - from the utopian novel by V. F. Odoevsky; 1829), helicostat (and var. helistat, one of the "hybrid" airships; 1981), solnstat (1978), stratostat (a high-altitude balloon with a hermetic gondola; its design was proposed by D. I. Mendeleev in 1875).

In the Russian language at the beginning of the XIX century, along with the noun navigation, there was also ship navigation (for example. Commercial newspaper. 1828. N 23). Having long mastered the sea element, accustomed to the seas and oceans, man and the air space above his head likened and figuratively called the air ocean (later with V. Mayakovsky:

air sea). Hence, the generalized name of balloon flights as aeronautics is clear. tracing paper fran. aeronautics), because balloons float, or rather, wander in the air at the will of the wind, like rafts in the ocean. A. I. Kuprin, who made the ascent in 1909, said about this: "In a balloon you feel completely helpless. You are a toy of the air currents, you float (emphasis added) wherever the wind drives you ( ... ) On the ball - you are the slave of the ball "(Moskovskaya gazeta. 1910. December 13).

Any navigation, including air navigation, presupposes the presence of a "watercraft" - a ship. For the first time about such a ship in Russia, they learned from a translated book written even before the experiments of the Montgolfier brothers:

"Blanchard uselessly attempted to launch a ship, which he deliberately made for this purpose" (Meerwein K. F. The art of flying like a bird. Moscow, 1794; French ed. 1782). Over time, the phrase airship has firmly established itself in the language.

Interestingly, in 1812, a French inventor in the Russian service, Leppich, was going to build a military airship for 40 people, capable of carrying artillery with cores, boxes of gunpowder (prototypes of aerial bombs), etc.The ship was supposed to fight Napoleon's hordes, but for various reasons nothing came of this venture.

And a little later, the question arose about the air fleet; one of the first to write about it was aeronaut A. Grishkevicius in 1851. However, a genuine air fleet, i.e. a collection of vessels with a service base and airports (later word) it could appear only with the development of (military) aviation, i.e. in the mid-1910s. The famous writer and reporter V. A. Gilyarovsky shrewdly wrote in 1913: "States try to get ahead of each other in the victory over the air, realizing that whoever first has a strong air fleet will be the ruler of the world "(With the permission of their superiors). However, this problem worried the public much earlier: "Air navigation (...) it can change all the conditions of naval and military power

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various powers" (Balloonist. 1880. N 1). At the end of 1914, the Society of Russian Architects and Artists even announced a drawing contest for a circle to collect donations for the construction of an air fleet. Russian military aviation was created in a very short time. In 1918, the Main Directorate of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Air Fleet was formed in the RSFSR, and the master of neologisms Vl. Mayakovsky soon mentioned the air dreadnoughts (1925).

Russian airship in the form of word-forming tracing paper entered the French language: aeroskaf (1859, from the Greek skaphos-ship). This name for his "flying boat" was suggested by Charvin by analogy with piroscaf (Balloonist. 1880. N 8). Here it should be noted that the "aviation" terminology of that period was largely international; for the creation of new words, mainly Greek and Latin roots were used. In this "imported" form, the word returned to Russia. In 1865, the St. Petersburg "Illustrated Newspaper" (No. 9) published an article "Aeroscaf", which described a controlled balloon, the prototype of an airship. For some time, the aeroscaph lasted in Russian - this was the name of the aircraft of the 1880s, which the Aeronautic magazine wrote about (for example, about the Kostovich aeroscaph, 1882). It even got a domestic synonym - aeroyacht (1913). Then "ship" was replaced by other names.

However, much later, according to the same model with a second base-a space suit, a bathyscaphe appeared that has nothing to do with air. And the Soviet science fiction writer G. Gurevich proposed his own name for the" time ship " - temposcaph and its pilot: temponaut (Gurevich G. Tempo-grad. Moscow, 1980).

In 1835, the "Library for Reading" announced that the European Astronomical Society invites those who want to see the first airship (Vol. 12, Ed. VII). One of these ships was seen in England by A. I. Turgenev, who wrote in his diary (1835): "It is controlled by fake wings, which (...) run by 17 air sailors" (Chronicle of the Russian. Diaries, Moscow-L., 1964. It is interesting that this "marine" image lasted for almost a hundred years: in 1918, S. Yesenin wrote:: "The reefs of the air will be seen through the eyes of the shipwrights of the air, just as the reefs of the water will be seen" (cit. by: Rus magazine. 1994. N 11). Here it is appropriate to recall that the first Russian aviators were trained as sailors. Similar parallels of the two elements continued until the beginning of the XX century. Heavier than Air magazine wrote in an editorial: "Just as there is already a type of 'sea wolf', so the type of 'air wolf' must now be developed" (1911, No. 1).

With the raising of the" ceiling " of human flights, a new word has also appeared:

astronautics - star navigation (the author of the term is a Frenchman

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Esno-Peltri, 1927). You can only fly to the stars by rocket. And already in 1935, K. E. Tsiolkovsky" by inertia " proposed the term rocket navigation, although rockets, as we know, do not float. Even later, a new concept appeared-the cosmic ocean, which is attributed to S. P. Korolev (Technique-youth. 1981. N 4) and, accordingly, cosmonautics (Savchenko V. Za perevalom, Moscow, 1984). It was during this period of space exploration that S. P. Korolev's suggestion also introduced the phrase spaceship, although it has been known in the language since 1915 (for more information about" ships", see: Russian at school. 1990. N 4).

The already named air sailors, shipbuilders, etc. for the designation of pilots in the Russian language still did not take root. For our ancestors, the French term aeronaut (from the Greek nautes - swimming) turned out to be more attractive - literally: balloonist. This model has become quite productive: with the second basis-navt (- swimmer), there is now a large group of terms: astronaut (including for the self-name of American cosmonauts), stratonaut, cosmonaut (originally, before real space flights, - aeronaut // Truth. 1957. b Oct.), biocosmonaut, UFO-navt, chrononaut, aquanaut... For some, there are Russian tracing papers-equivalents: zvezdoplavatel, stratoplavatel, kosmoplavatel.

Linguistically interesting is the combination of fleet and aerostatics. Even during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, a successful attempt was made in Russia to launch balloons from the deck of the cruiser Rus. Already in our days, such a ship was called a balloon carrier. Later, this experience was repeated for placing and launching seaplanes from the ship. The ship then received the name aerobronosets (To sport. 1911. N 24), Now the words aircraft carrier, helicopter carrier are created according to this scheme (the model is quite productive).

Along with the official, "scientific" names, the first aircraft in broad linguistic usage began to be called by the names of their inventors: montgolfiers, charliers... This tradition was later passed on to motor flying machines. The first aircraft of the 1890s-1910s also bore the names of designers, who often themselves were also test pilots who demonstrated the capabilities of their vehicles: farman, Bleriot, Antoinette, Wright, Voisin, Nieuport and many others.

Even at the end of the XVIII century, at the dawn of aeronautics, an attempt was made in France to design a controlled balloon-ballon dirigeahle, i.e., what later became known (by the second word) as an airship. The first launch of such a device took place in France in 1852: the airship rose into the air,but could not move.

In 1866, the Russian Admiral N. M. Sokovnin proposed his

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an airship is essentially a jet balloon, a type of airscaph. One of the first real flying airships, i.e. motor balloons, was also named after its designer - Zeppelin (1900). Somewhat earlier (in 1892) K. E. Tsiolkovsky published the article "Metal controlled balloon", i.e. he proposed his original design of the airship. But he didn't "know"that word then!

The "named" tradition was continued with the development of motor aviation in the first third of the XX century and in subsequent years. Let us recall the names of only some (and only domestic) types of aircraft that have become their "brand names": Po (N. N. Polikarpov), Da (S. A. Lavochkin), Il (S. V. Ilyushin), Mi (M. L. Mil), AN (O. K. Antonov), Tu (A. N.. Tupolev) and others. This turned out to be practically very convenient, since it saves language resources while maximizing information (alphabetic symbols are usually accompanied by a numeric code) and also fixes the author's priority.

With the advent of the latest aircraft, balloons (balloons, balloons, etc.), however, are not a thing of the past. They are still successfully used today for sports purposes, for various attractions, etc. Naturally, their designs are being improved and modernized, so the vocabulary related to aeronautics is preserved in the language.

Saint-Petersburg

The ending follows

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