Sir George Cayley, il ''nonno'' dei fratelli Wright

Oggi ricorre il centesimo anniversario del primo volo dei fratelli Wright.



Il loro prototipo, chiamato "The Flyier", alle 10:30 del 17 dicembre 1903 si staccò da terra per 12 secondi, percorrendo in totale 37 metri. Nelle ore successive i due fratelli si alternarono al posto di pilotaggio del Flyier, aumentando ogni volta sia la durata del volo che la distanza percorsa (nel caso del quarto volo, oltre 120 metri).



I Wright furono preceduti da una lunga schiera di appassionati e di inventori, tutti decisi a dimostrare che era possibile far volare un mezzo "più pesante dell'aria".



Fra questi, alcuni decenni prima del volo del Flyer, troviamo Sir George Cayley, un eccentrico baronetto inglese a cui si deve il merito di avere concepito per primo l'idea di un velivolo ad ala fissa: fino ai suoi tempi, infatti, l'idea prevalente era che i mezzi più pesanti dell'aria dovessero essere forniti di ali mobili, proprio come quelle degli uccelli.



Scrive Wired News:

With all the hoopla surrounding the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' legendary flight, it'd be easy to overlook the work of an eccentric English baronet, Sir George Cayley. But Cayley is as responsible as anyone for making the age-old dream of flying machines real, aviation historians say. And Cayley's aircraft flew 50 years before Orville Wright took off from Kitty Hawk.



Decades before the brothers were born, Cayley had sketched out the basics of the modern airplane. Studying birds, he identified the forces that make flight possible. And on a breezy day in 1853, Cayley forced his coachman into a makeshift glider, rolled him down a hill, and turned him into the first man to fly in a heavier-than-air craft, said Phil Scott, author of The Wrong Stuff: Attempts at Flight Before (and After) the Wright Brothers.



"Nothing really mattered before Cayley," said Peter Jakab, chairman of the National Air and Space Museum's aeronautics division. "Cayley's the watershed figure in terms of real progress towards the airplane."



"He's the father of modern aeronautics," agreed Bruce Bleakley, a vice president of the San Diego Aerospace Museum.



The engineers and entrepreneurs who had been tinkering with flying contraptions prior to Cayley thought people needed to act like birds -- and flap their wings in order to soar. Cayley was the first to see through this fallacy, Scott said.



"He made this incredible leap," Scott said. "It sounds basic now. But like the screw or the lever, it was one of those thoughts that changed the world."

Link: Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company, un museo virtuale dell'aviazione dedicato principalmente (ma non solo) ai fratelli Orville e Wilbur Wright.