Man Who Discovered Flight George Cayley and the First Airplane

Cayley was a man living in the eighteenth century. The railway engine hadn't been invented yet, never mind the automobile. The steam engine was in its infancy, the internal combustion engine a pipe dream; the invention of the paper clip was a century away. In 1795 wood, iron, and stone were the working materials for construction. Leather, canvas, or even silk offered durable and flexible alternatives, but how could anyone build a plane of such strength and lightness as to allow it to safely support, on air alone, its own weight, and that of a man? Within the course of six scribbled pages in his notebook, Cayley had shown that man made flight by wing was a theoretical possibility, but practically, with engineering constraints as they were at the time, it was a non-starter. So having discovered that it could happen and then almost immediately proving that it couldn't happen yet, what next? Book jacket.Dee, Richard is the author of 'Man Who Discovered Flight George Cayley and the First Airplane', published 2007 under ISBN 9780771029714 and ISBN 0771029713.