Croatian Culture:
Faust Vrancic (1550-1617) was a notable scholar whose interest comprised mathematics, physics, phylosophy and technology. He spent some time at the court of the German emperor Rudolf II who was also the sovereign to the Croatians, Hungarians and Czechs... His most interesting invention was a parachute or homo volans. Faust Vrancic performed a jump with his parachute somewhere in Venice; this fact is explicitly stated in a book written by John Willkins (1614-1672), secretary of the Royal Society in London, only 30 years after the jump.Hungarian Quarterly:
Several countries may claim Faustus Verancsics, who was born in Dalmatia, and educated in Hungary from childhood (in the Pozsony home of his uncle, Antal Verancsics, the Archbishop of Esztergom). After studying at the university in Padua, he returned to Pozsony to devote himself to the study of scientific problems. He was given the captainship of the castle of Veszprem, in western Hungary, before becoming the Emperor Rudolf's secretary for Hungarian affairs. Later he became a priest and ultimately the Bishop of Csanad. In the last one and a half decades of his life he went to Italy, where he became a monk. He lived in Rome and Venice and his writings were published there. He compiled a five-language dictionary in Latin, Italian, German, Croatian and Hungarian which was published in 1595. All his life he pursued solutions for technical problems, thus developing several new ideas and inventions. In 1616 he published Machinae Novae, which was a summary of his ideas and a significant work in the history of science. The book describes more than sixty inventions, forty-nine of them with detailed illustrations. His inventions cover a wide range: grinders, windmills, tide-mill, compacting machine, twelve variations of bridge structures, the suspension-bridge, the parachute (closer to the present paraglider), a dredger, a rope-weaving machine, a steel spring and friction brake for coaches.