February 23, 2018 | Leave a comment If you ask the question; “Who was the first person to achieve powered flight using a heavier than air craft?”, the answer most people will give you, is Orville Wright. Some, particularly those who read my earlier story entitled Wright? Wrong!, will gleefully tell you it was actually Gustave Whitehead. Certainly, Gustave, who took to the air in August 1901, seems to have beaten the Wright Brothers, who didn’t get off the ground until December 1903, to it, by over two years. Either way, the momentous achievements of both Whitehead and the Wrights, were that they actually flew in a heavier than air craft. But, in order to correctly answer the above question, we will need to go all the way back to 1848, and to the town of Chard in Somerset, England. John Stringfellow was born in Sheffield, England in 1799, and earned his living in Chard, as a maker of bobbins and carriages for the lace making industry. However, in collaboration with an inventor by the name of William Samuel Henson, the pair were awarded British patent 9478 in 1842, for an aerial steam carriage, known simply as The Aerial. An Artist’s Impression of The Aerial The design was for a monoplane with a wingspan of 150 feet, to be powered by a steam engine producing 50 horse power. Stringfellow and Henson anticipated carrying 10 to 12 passengers at a top speed of 50 miles per hour, for up to 1,000 miles. The undercarriage was a three wheeled design, and the intention was that it would take off from an inclined ramp. However, owing to the poor power to weight ratio of the hefty steam engine, the design was simply too heavy and under powered to be capable of flying, and consequently, a full scale version of The Aerial was never constructed. John Stringfellow Instead, Henson and Strigfellow produced a progression of scale models of the design, initially without much success. A model built by Henson in 1843 managed only a tentative hop, as the inventor continued to grapple with the difficulty of using steam powered technology in an aircraft. He subsequently built a larger model with a 20 foot wingspan, but despite numerous attempts between 1844 and 1847, it too failed to fly. Shortly thereafter, Henson emigrated to the United States, settling in Newark, New Jersey, and whilst continuing to work on new inventions, undertook little more in the way of aviation research. William Samuel Henson Strigfellow, meanwhile, had been working on his own model, a monoplane with a 10 foot wingspan, and powered by a tiny 3 kilogram steam engine, which he had also built. The machine had a wooden frame covered in silk, and the engine, housed in a gondola beneath the wings, powered two large propellers. In early 1848, Stringfellow’s contraption was ready for testing. All he needed now, was a safe environment in which to make the first attempt at powered flight. Fortunately, Stringfellow was able to secure the loan of a long room in a disused lace factory in Chard. The room was approximately 20 metres long and almost 4 metres in height. The model was to be launched from an inclined wire, so as to give it sufficient altitude to be able to continue airborne, once operating under it’s own steam. However, the first attempt almost ended in disaster. The adjustable tail had been set at too steep an angle, and the machine stalled and fell backwards, landing on, and breaking, the tail. Undeterred, Stringfellow repaired the tail, set it at a less acute angle and prepared to go again. What happened next is probably best left to Stringfellow’s son, Fred, to describe: “The steam was again got up, and the machine started down the wire, and, upon reaching the point of self-detachment, it gradually rose until it reached the farther end of the room, striking a hole in the canvas placed to stop it. In experiments the machine flew well, when rising as much as one in seven.” Stringfellow’s Flying Machine So there you have it, on an undetermined date in 1848, although thought to have been sometime in June, it was in a disused lace mill in Chard, Somerset, England, that for the first time in history, a heavier than air craft actually lifted into the air. Stringfellow was subsequently invited to bring his flying machine to London, where at Crenmore Gardens, demonstrations of the machine’s ability, were witnessed by many. The longest flight achieved by Stringfellow’s machine was approximately 37 metres, although it would have gone further, but for the canvas sheeting strategically placed to stop it. A Contemporary Report of the Crenmore Gardens Demonstrations John Stringfellow’s flying machine can be viewed today at London’s Science Museum, and a bronze model of the world’s first powered aircraft stands proudly in Fore Street, Chard. Shortly before he died in 1883, John Stringfellow made the following self deprecating comment; “Somebody must do better than I before we succeed with aerial navigation.” Given the technology at his disposal, John Stringfellow almost certainly took powered flight about as far as it was possible to go, in the first half of the nineteenth century. With the invention of the internal combustion engine, and its vastly superior power to weight ratio over its steam predecessor, pioneers like Whitehead and the Wrights, were thus able to improve upon the groundbreaking work of John Stringfellow, from over half a century earlier. As Sir Issac Newton succinctly put it in 1675; “If I have seen further it is by standing of the shoulders of Giants.” And so, in answer to the above question, whilst Gustave Whitehead and the Wright Brothers rightly deserve their places in aviation history, it is actually a to man from an earlier time, that the accolade must go. I give you John Stringfellow, the Father of Powered Flight! Bronze Model of Stringfellow’s Flying Machine Sources: http://www.chardmuseum.co.uk/powered-flight/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_steam_carriage