George Cayley

Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet (* December 27, 1773 in Scarborough, Yorkshire, † December 15, 1857 in Brompton, west of Scarborough ) was an English engineer, who occupied himself as one of the first with the science of flight. He built the first glider in the world already in 1852.

Carley proved due to intensive studies to fly against the belief of many that it is impossible for man with a pair of " belted wing " of their own muscle power. A on this subject written by him in 1799 treatise had great influence on the further development of aviation. Also on his findings have built their work, the Wright brothers.

1804 Cayley began to build large slider that already have strong similarities to today's gliders. The gliders were monoplanes with large front wings and smaller rear wings and horizontal stabilizers. The glider he tried successfully with animals as occupation.

In 1809, there were according to Cayley's own report in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts, Volume 24, a flight in a glider. In the report, he indicates, although he had only tested the flight characteristics and safety precautions, but still had no way to fly even with crew. According to research by Richard Dee Susan Sibbald reported in her memoirs of a dinner with George Cayley in 1810, in which the latter tells how during a test flight in 1809, a boy had been crashed and injured.

In the middle of 1849 there was a manned flight of a glider with a boy as a pilot. After the sketches in Cayley notebook Egypt it was a glider with three superposed wings and side-mounted, movable wings, which should provide the lift. Mounted this construction was on a canoe -shaped rack with wheels.

End of June 1852 or early July 1853, he is said to have persuaded his coachman, as a pilot (or rather: ballast ) to make available. The slider should have been dragged up a mountain in Brompton, where he then, with the driver on board, several workers of the mountain was pushed down until he took off and landed safely on a meadow after a 130 m long flight. According to legend, completely terrified coachman should have terminated on the spot. This would have been the first recorded successful manned glider, some 40 years before Otto Lilienthal.

The fact that have no manned flights took place over the next 40 years, up to the experiments of Otto Lilienthal, lets rise to the appearance of Cayley doubt. On the other hand, the flying machine was reconstructed in 1973 after the original plans and flown successfully on the original starting point of the famous British glider pilot Derek Piggott in the car towing, with Piggot could even control the slider controls. Thus, the basic validity of the construction is at least proven. Another, later replica flew in 2003. In this experiment Allan McWhirter and Richard Branson were the pilots.