The biblical dream of walking on water has long fascinated and tormented man. While he succeeded in mimicking the birds and conquering the air, the water-strider’s gravity-defying prance has not yet proven amenable to his mechanical imitation. One early account of mechanically-aided aquatic ambulism (above) can be found in Daniel Schwenter’s 1636 book Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae. The man in the illustration struts confidently through the seas wearing what is described as Wind-hosen and Flossfedern — air pants and winged paddles around his ankles. Leibniz claimed to have witnessed a demonstration of this device on the river Seine in Paris sometime around 1675.

Others, like Gaspar Schott, were more interested in walking just below the surface of the water than on it. Thus, the invention of the diving bell, a barrel-like device first described by Aristotle and purportedly used by the forces of Alexander the Great to clear the harbor at Tyre in 332 BC.

In his Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo da Vinci described a device similar to cross-country skis which could be deployed on the water:

In 1858, one H.R. Rowlands, filed a patent for a life raft consisting of small boats attached beneath the feet. Developments in “water shoe” and “water skate” technology have more or less continued upon this trajectory ever since.

Another device patented in 1918 by one Martin Jelalian proposed adding a gas balloon to provide extra buoyancy:

While a number of contests have been held over the years for engineers of water-walking devices, none has yet proven entirely successful. The same can perhaps be said of a device developed recently by Yoav Rosen:

Not long ago, scientists discovered that the water strider is able to skip across the water’s surface by capturing small bubbles of air in the hairs beneath its feet. Such a strategy could not be applied easily to human water-walking without sacrificing dynamic stability. However, the waterball represents a novel use of bubbles in the service of aquatic ambulism:

We recently came across another device for sale in a SkyMall catalogue which allows the user to glide across the water by simply hopping up or down. It has a top speed of 17 mph and costs $500. The dream lives on.

And what about the most famous of all aquatic ambulists? He may have figured out the neatest trick of all:

Writing in The Journal of Paleolimnology, Dr. Nof and his colleagues point out that unusual freezing processes probably occurred in the region in the last 12,000 years, icing over parts of freshwater Galilee. This has not happened in recent history, but there were much colder stretches 1,500 to 2,500 years ago.

The scientists note that Galilee has warm, salty springs along the western shore, an area Jesus frequented. The water above the springs does not convect when it is cold. If air temperatures dipped below freezing, as sometimes happened then, surface ice could have formed thick enough to support human weight and inspire the biblical story.

From a distance, the scientists suggested, a person on the ice might appear to be walking on water, particularly if it had just rained and left a smoothed-out watery coating on the ice.