George Cayley

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Image:George Cayley.jpg Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet (27 December 1773–15 December 1857) was an exuberant English polymath from Brompton-by-Sawdon, near Scarborough in Yorkshire. He pioneered the study of aerodynamics over four decades before the development of powered flight. He served for the Whig party in Parliament, and helped found the Polytechnic Institution, serving as its chairman for many years. He was a distant cousin of the mathematician Arthur Cayley.

Cayley inherited Brompton Hall and its estates on the death of his father, the 5th baronet Cayley. Captured by the optimism of the times, he engaged in a wide variety of engineering projects. Among the many things that he invented are self-righting life-boats, tension-spoke wheels, the "Universal Railway" (his term for caterpillar tractors), automatic signals for railway crossings, seat belts, experimental designs for helicopters, and a kind of prototypical internal combustion engine fuelled by gunpowder. He also contributed in the fields of prosthetics, heat engines, electricity, theatre architecture, ballistics, optics and land reclamation.

Image:Governableparachute.jpg He is mainly remembered, however, for his flying machines, including the working, piloted glider that he designed and built. To measure the drag on objects at different speeds and angles of attack, he built a "whirling-arm apparatus." He also experimented with free-flying model gliders of various wing sections, in the stairwells at Brompton Hall. These scientific experiments led him to develop an efficient cambered airfoil and to identify the four vector forces that influence an aircraft: thrust, lift, drag, and weight. He discovered the importance of dihedral for lateral stability in flight, and deliberately set the centre of gravity of many of his models well below the wings for this reason. Investigating many other theoretical aspects of flight, many now acknowledge him as the first aeronautical engineer.

By 1804 his model gliders appeared similar to modern aircraft: a pair of large monoplane wings towards the front, with a smaller tailplane at the back comprising horizontal stabilisers and a vertical fin. Eventually he designed one large enough to carry a pilot. After demonstrating that animals could fly in it safely, in the summer of 1853 he persuaded his coachman to fly it. Launched from a hill on the Brompton Estate by teams of estate workers, Cayley's coachman flew the machine 130 metres across Brompton Dale, landing safely into a meadow on the other side. This was the earliest recorded manned, heavier-than-air flight.

Image:Cayley Glider Replica Flown By Derek Piggott 2.jpg

A replica of the machine was flown at the original site in Brompton Dale in 1974 and in the mid 1980s by Derek Piggott (right). Another replica flew there in 2003, first piloted by Allan McWhirter and later by Richard Branson.

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