Abbas ibn Firnas

Abu al -Qasim ibn Abbas Firnas Arabic عباس بن فرناس, ʿ Abbās b DMG. Firnas, (c. 810 in Ronda, † 887 or 888 in Córdoba) was a poet and scholar Berber descent in Al -Andalus.

Life and work

He was among the emirs I. al - Hakam I, Abd ar- Rahman II and Muhammad Poet Laureate of the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba. As a scholar he was interested in mathematics, astronomy and physics. He made known the Indian decimal system in Andalusia, he had met even as they travel in today's Iraq. He developed a method of manufacturing colorless glass for corrective lenses ( " reading stones ").

It will give him even the construction of a flying machine attributed to what the poet Mu ʾ min ben Sa ʿ id following verse made ​​in the 9th century:

Quicker he flew, flying as the phoenix, as he wrapped the body in eagle feathers.

The tradition follows the chronicle ( Nafḥ ) of Al- Maqqari, a Moroccan historian of the 17th century who used many older and no longer existing sources. The flight apparatus consisted allegedly of spring wings and should have allowed Abbas to fly from a hill in Arruzafa near Córdoba several hundred meters and return to the starting point. When trying to land he broke both legs, one of them open. He attributed it to the fact that he had forgotten to construct a tail. The test flight has several parallels with that of the Eilmer of Malmesbury, almost 200 years later; that Ibn Firnas Eilmer have served as a direct model, but is rejected by recent research as unlikely.

Appreciation

After the crater Ibn Abbas Firnas was named on the moon. Also one of the four airports of Baghdad bears his name.

On 14 January 2011 a bridge over the Guadalquivir was opened in Córdoba, the ' bears the name of Ibn Firnas.