The Airplane - Jay Spenser [5]
Also in 1809, Cayley constructed an almost full-size glider to his formula. It had a fabric wing 300 square feet (28 square meters) in area. Running with this glider into a breeze, he found it lifted him so strongly his feet lost traction on the grass. Occasionally it even plucked him briefly off the ground and he soared through the air.
A polymath, Cayley pursued interests in optics, theater design, prosthetics, ballistics, electricity, heat engines, and land reclamation, making contributions to all these fields. A prolific innovator concerned for human welfare, he invented a self-righting lifeboat. Pondering history’s first train accident, he came up with the cowcatcher, seatbelts, and automatic signals for railway crossings. And long before military tanks or construction equipment needed caterpillar treads, he patented one he termed the universal railway.
Cayley even dabbled in physics. Reading Sir Isaac Newton, who died a half century before he himself was born, he took his famous predecessor to task for having too simplistic a theory of lift, a failing he corrected.
In addition to these pursuits, Sir George helped found and chaired a polytechnic institution in London, and for a period he represented Scarborough as a member of Parliament. He belonged to the progressive Whig party, naturally.
With such duties and diversions, it was only late in his life that Cayley found time to return to his first love. Progressing to full-scale flight tests, he constructed a small glider along the lines of his 1799 design except that this one had three fabric wings stacked vertically. So well did this triplane glider perform with ballast that Cayley allowed a ten-year-old boy to make at least one untethered hop in it. Here in 1849, then, was history’s first free flight of a manned heavier-than-air vehicle, albeit an unpowered one.
In 1853, at age seventy-nine, Cayley completed a large single-wing glider and induced one of his servants, a coachman, to fly it for him. Much more ambitious than the previous experiment, this flight took place at Brompton Dale with Cayley’s family, friends, and servants looking on.
The coachman was more comfortable with carriages than gliders. He settled apprehensively into its seat and nervously grasped a tiller attached to rear control surfaces while his master communicated final flying instructions. Collective help was brought to bear, and the machine was sent rolling down a steep hill. As the glider gathered speed, its fabric wing billowed and lifted it into the air. Witnesses saw it dip alarmingly and then level out in time for a jolting touchdown some 900 feet (275 meters) from the takeoff point.
Cayley was among those who rushed up as the coachman climbed out. “Please, Sir George,” the servant blurted, “I wish to give notice—I was hired to drive, not fly!”6
The flight at Brompton Dale took place exactly fifty years before two brothers in the United States would invent what this nobleman had conceived of in England. Cayley’s contributions to the Wright brothers’ coming success are too numerous to count even though they are largely indirect. For example, normal wheels would have been too heavy for gliders, so Cayley invented a tension-spoke wheel using taut strings to keep its hub centered. Later versions of this lightweight wheel featuring metal spokes would prove critical to the bicycle, an invention that helped set those two American brothers on the path to success.
Sir George Cayley died in 1857, at age eighty-three. Ultimately, the most astonishing thing about him is how much he accomplished with no one else’s thinking to build upon. Two centuries later, this North Yorkshire genius remains early flight’s towering intellect, a claim rivaled only by Wilbur Wright.
Cayley’s unshakable belief in the airplane