Abbas Ibn Firnas
Just as futuristic was the work of an Andalusian musician, glassworker, thinker and inventor, Abbas Ibn Firnas. Although documentary proof of his work is not as extensive as many Arab-Muslim thinkers, multiple accounts have survived in credible second and third hand histories, enough to give him the title of father of modern glider aviation.
Working in the Umayyad court in Cordoba in 852, he is said to have observed a gambler-daredevil named Armen Firman take bets and parachute off the top of the minaret of the Great Mosque in Cordoba. This rudimentary parachute flight, which Firman survived, inspired Ibn Firnas to redirect his work away from music and glassware to the mechanics of flight.
He studied birds, falling seeds, leaves, feathers, and bats and devoted more than 20 years to building what seems to have been the first modern glider, with wings sewn of silk, wood, and actual feathers. When in his 60s, he took a number of friends and observers to the Sierra Morena, a ridge outside Cordoba. Accounts say that he jumped off the hillside into the wind and remained airborne for 10 minutes, sailing over the fertile irrigated plain outside Cordoba. Only upon landing did he remember that he had omitted a critical part of his design, something not unlike a bird's tail that allows it to control its descent. This important realisation came too late, because Ibn Firnas hit the ground fast and hard, breaking bones and leaving him in pain for the rest of his life, which lasted another 12 years. So he did survive to talk about his discovery, even if the outcome was less than perfect.
Illustrations of his flying device are not unlike the design for a glider that Leonardo Da Vinci drew nearly 700 years later. Ironically, Da Vinci is given credit for being the first modern thinker to seriously address the means of flight. Whether Da Vinci saw drawings or read about the flight of Abbas Ibn Firnas will never be known. But even if not, it demonstrated that two great minds would independently solve in a similar way one of the greatest engineering puzzles of history... how to transfer the skills of flying birds and insects to mankind.
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by BuggyPilot » Tue Apr 15, 2014 10:32 am 
