George Cayley

English inventor

• Born: December 27, 1773
• Birthplace: Scarborough, Yorkshire, England
• Died: December 15, 1857
• Place of death: Brompton, Yorkshire, England

Cayley was the first inventor to publish a description of the essential components of airplanes—namely, the concept that an airplane should consist of one or more fixed wings, a fuselage, and a tail. Moreover, he was the first to carry out a serious program of aeronautical research.

Early Life

George Cayley was born in a Scarborough house named Paradise. His mother, Isabella Seton Cayley, was a member of a well-known Scottish family descended from Robert Bruce. His father, Sir Thomas Cayley, was descended from the eleventh century Norman invaders of England. Because of the chronic ill health of Cayley’s father, Cayley’s parents spent much time abroad, and Cayley’s early days were spent at the family house at Helmsley, where he enjoyed much freedom. There, he acquired an early interest in mechanical devices, and he was frequently to be found at the village watchmaker.

After the death of Cayley’s grandfather (also Sir George Cayley), the major and extensive family estate at Brompton passed quickly to Cayley’s father, who lived for only another eighteen months, and then to George Cayley. By the year 1792, Sir George Cayley had become the sixth baronet at Brompton Hall—at the early age of eighteen. He was to spend the rest of his life as a moderately well-to-do Yorkshire country squire.

As was not unusual in the eighteenth century, Cayley had virtually no formal education. There is some evidence that he went to school briefly in York, but his main education stemmed from two powerful and influential tutors: George Walker, a mathematician of high reputation, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a man of extensive intellect; and George Morgan, a Unitarian minister, scientist, and lecturer on electricity. Both tutors were freethinkers, and they had a major impact on the wide breadth of education and open-mindedness acquired by Cayley during the first twenty-five years of his life. Cayley never lost his enthusiasm for knowledge and invention; by the early nineteenth century he was recognized and sought after as one of England’s leading scholars in matters of science, technology, and social ethics.

Struck by the beauty and intelligence of his first tutor’s daughter, Sarah Walker, Cayley fell deeply in love in 1792, the same year in which he acquired the family estate at Brompton. Three years later they were married; their marriage was to last for sixty-two years, ended only by Cayley’s death in 1857.

Cayley’s contributions to aeronautics also began in his early life. At the age of nineteen, he designed and flew a simple helicopter-like model made of wood and feathers and powered by a string-and-bow mechanism. This was the leading edge of a virtual outpouring of aeronautical thought, research, and invention to follow for the next eighteen years.

Life’s Work

The concept of the modern airplane—namely, that of a machine with fixed wings, fuselage, and horizontal and vertical tail—was first advanced by Cayley in 1799. This concept was a marked departure from all previous aeronautical thinking, which was focused on machines called ornithopters, characterized by flapping wings for both lift and propulsion—an idea fostered from the Greek and Roman ages in an attempt to emulate bird flight directly. Cayley’s idea was ingenious. It involved the separation of the mechanisms for producing lift and thrust: A fixed wing, inclined to the airflow, would produce the lift, and a separate mechanism using either flappers or an airscrew driven by an internal combustion engine would provide the propulsion. In 1799, Cayley etched a picture of his airplane concept on a small silver disk (about the size of an American quarter); this disk is the first rendering of the modern airplane, and it is now displayed with distinction at the British Science Museum in South Kensington, London.

In 1804, Cayley designed and successfully flew a hand-launched glider made of wood and cloth, incorporating his fixed-wing, fuselage, and tail concept. It was the first modern-configuration airplane to fly in history. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Cayley carried out numerous aeronautical experiments, the results of which were published in a momentous “triple paper” titled “On Aerial Navigation,” which appeared in three issues of Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts (November, 1809; February, 1810; and March, 1810).

Cayley’s paper published many “firsts” in the technical development of aeronautics. Cayley was, for example, the first to use a whirling arm for obtaining aerodynamic data on the lift and drag force exerted on winglike shapes; the first to realize that lift is obtained from the combination of low pressure on the top surface of the wing and high pressure on the bottom surface; the first to recognize that a cambered (curved) airfoil shape produces more lift than a straight, flat surface; the first to realize that a dihedral angle (wings bent upward slightly from the center section) achieves lateral (rolling) stability for the airplane; and the first to obtain research results on aeronautical streamlining to reduce drag. This triple paper by Cayley is of such aeronautical and historical significance that it was reprinted by the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1876, 1910, and 1955; by the American journal The Aeronautical Annual in 1895; by two French journals in 1877 and 1912; and, as appendixes, in two definitive books on Cayley, one by J. Laurence Pritchard (1961) and the other by Charles H. Gibbs-Smith (1962).

In concert with his aeronautical interests, Cayley carried out extensive works on the design of internal combustion engines. He recognized that existing steam engines, with their huge external boilers, were much too heavy in relation to their power output to be of any practical application to airplanes. To improve on this situation, Cayley invented the hot-air engine in 1799 and spent the next fifty-eight years of his life trying to perfect the idea, along with a host of other mechanical designers of that day. The invention of the successful gas-fueled engine in France during the mid-nineteenth century finally superseded Cayley’s hot-air engine.

For reasons not totally understood, Cayley directed his aeronautical interest to lighter-than-air balloons and airships during the period from 1810 to 1843, making contributions to the understanding of such devices and inventing several designs for steerable airships. Then, from 1843 until his death in 1857, he returned to the airplane, designing and testing several full-scale aircraft. One was a machine with triple wings (a triplane) and human-actuated flappers for propulsion; in 1849 this machine made a floating flight off the ground, carrying a ten-year-old boy for several yards down a hill at Brompton. Another was a single-wing (monoplane) glider, which in 1853 flew across a small valley (no longer than five hundred yards) with Cayley’s coachman aboard as an unwilling passenger. (At the end of this flight, the coachman was quoted as saying, “Please, Sir George, I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive and not to fly.”)

Although Cayley’s standing in history is based on his aeronautical contributions, this broadly educated and liberal-thinking man accomplished much more during his long life of nearly eighty-four years. Of particular note is his invention in 1825 of the tracted land vehicle, a vehicle that was the forerunner of the Caterpillar tractor and the military tanks of the twentieth century. In 1847, he invented an artificial hand. This artificial limb was a breakthrough in such devices, replacing the simple hook that had been in use for centuries. Cayley’s interests were purely humane; he expected and received virtually no financial compensation for this invention.

Among Cayley’s main other nonaeronautical accomplishments were his contributions to parliamentary reform, leading to a publication on that subject in 1818; election to the chair of the powerful Whig Club at York in 1820; his work as a member of Parliament for Scarborough (starting in 1832); his founding of the Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street, London, in 1839, for scientific and technical exhibitions and education (now the Regent Street Polytechnic, an institution for continuing education); and his inventions to promote railway safety (again, he was driven by a genuine concern for improving the lot of humankind, especially that of the poor). His social conscience was never more in evidence than in his efforts to help unemployed laborers from the York area in 1842; he wrote an appeal for help in the newspapers and contributed a large sum of his own money (although he was not a rich man) to help relieve the social and economic distress in the area.

A portrait of Sir George Cayley hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London; it was painted when he was sixty-eight years old. It shows a still-handsome man with a soft, kindly, and scholarly countenance. It is no surprise that Cayley was well liked and respected by his family as a father and husband, by his friends as a kind, thoughtful, and humorous country squire, and by his scientific and technical colleagues as one of the most innovative, knowledgeable, and well-read people in England at the time. When Cayley died, peacefully at Brompton Hall on December 15, 1857, many members of social and scientific England strongly felt his loss, as evidenced by numerous obituaries and statements at that time.

Significance

It is well known that Orville and Wilbur Wright accomplished the first successful, heavier-than-air, powered, manned flight, on December 17, 1903. If Sir George Cayley had been alive at that moment, he would have been the first to applaud the accomplishment, because it is clear from his writings that he took for granted the eventual successful development of the airplane. Contrary to much popular belief, however, the Wright brothers did not invent the concept of the airplane; instead, they invented the world’s first successful, working airplane. The concept of the modern airplane is Cayley’s, and his alone. All modern historians of aviation agree to this, and indeed even the Wright brothers gave credit to Cayley in this regard.

It is interesting to note that credit to Cayley for his aeronautical contributions faded during the last half of the nineteenth century, in spite of his numerous publications in the field. Many would-be inventors in aviation either repeated some of Cayley’s work or used his ideas without knowing the source, mainly because of their ignorance of the literature. Historical research in the twentieth century, however, clearly gives Cayley his rightful place in history as the grandparent of modern aviation. He established, in total, all the essential ideas of powered heavier-than-air flight, even including the invention of a lightweight, wire-braced wheel for an undercarriage—a wheel that was to be utilized as the bicycle wheel when that vehicle was invented, during the late 1880’s.

Bibliography

Anderson, John D., Jr. Introduction to Flight. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Includes a lengthy discussion of Cayley’s contributions to the development of aviation, entitled “Sir George Cayley: The True Inventor of the Airplane.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Inventing Flight: The Wright Brothers and Their Predecessors. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Anderson’s history includes a chapter on Cayley’s concept of flight and his proposal for the first modern design of a fixed-wing aircraft.

Gibbs-Smith, Charles H. Aviation: An Historical Survey from Its Origins to the End of World War II. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970. A balanced survey of the historical development of aviation, including Cayley’s work. This is a good book from which to obtain an overall perspective on Cayley’s contributions in comparison with the complete picture of aeronautical development.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sir George Cayley, 1773-1857. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1968. An excellent pamphlet printed for the Science Museum, with a concise presentation of Cayley the man and the inventor.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sir George Cayley’s Aeronautics, 1796-1855. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1962. A thorough and definitive historical presentation of Cayley’s technical contributions, along with insightful commentary on Cayley’s work. A must for any serious student of Cayley’s life and contributions.

Hallion, Richard P. Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity Through the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Chapter 6, “Sir George Cayley and the Birth of Aeronautics,” describes Cayley’s work and his influence on the development of aircraft.

Pritchard, J. Laurence. Sir George Cayley: The Inventor of the Aeroplane. London: Max Parrish, 1961. This is the definitive biography of Sir George Cayley, a must for any student of his life.