It is as if it was written about him: “We teach airplanes how to fly." On that day, the 1st rank captain Alexander Mozhaysky entered the Department of Trade and Manufactures with a request for a five-year privilege for aeronautical apparatus. The Russian inventor was born into a family that gave the Russian fleet several generation of sailors. Maybe that's why the title of the projectile that he invented contained the word “swimming,” although by it had nothing to do with water. Being a hereditary sailor, a graduate of the Marine Corps, an officer who rose to the rank of a rear admiral, he was obsessed with the dream of building an aeronautic projectile. Alexander Fedorovich studied the structure of bird’s wings, investigated the operation of propellers, flight dynamics, experimented with toy kites. He almost immediately threw off his idea of ​​flapping wings, and built his models of aircraft with an unmoving wing. His models worked. In 1881, Mozhaysky received the first privilege for “aerial projectile" in Russia. In the same year, he started the construction of an airplane with two steam engines. The engines turned out to be heavy and low-power, and the plane did not take off into the air. At first, the military department got the development of Mozhaysky classified, but later found his experiments costly and untimely.

Mozhaysky sold his estates and belongings to continue his aeronautical experiments. He did not have time to finish them, but managed to write his own page in the history of aviation. But Mozhaysky himself still managed to fly, although not by plane: they tied the towing rope to a cart pulled by three horses, the horses galloped, and the kite under pressure air took off together the inventor who was holding onto a special device.