page_title: Early flying machines
section_title: The age of steam
hierarchical_section_title: Early flying machines / Heavier than air: sustained flight / The 19th century / The age of steam
caption_attribution_description: English: Victor_Tatin_aeroplane_1879
context_page_description: Early flying machines include all forms of aircraft studied or constructed before the development of the modern aeroplane by 1910. The story of modern flight begins more than a century before the first successful manned aeroplane, and the earliest aircraft thousands of years before.
context_section_description: Drawing directly from Cayley's work, William Samuel Henson's 1842 design for an aerial steam carriage broke new ground. Henson proposed a 150 feet (46 m) span high-winged monoplane, with a steam engine driving two pusher configuration propellers. Although only a design, (scale models were built in 1843 or 1848 and flew 10 or 130 feet) it was the first in history for a propeller-driven fixed-wing aircraft. Henson and his collaborator John Stringfellow even dreamed of the first Aerial Transit Company.
  In 1856, Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris made the first flight higher than his point of departure, by having his glider "L'Albatros artificiel" pulled by a horse on a beach. He reportedly achieved a height of 100 meters, over a distance of 200 meters.
  The British advances had galvanised French researchers. Starting in 1857, Félix du Temple and his brother Luis built several models using a clockwork mechanism as a power source and later a small steam engine. In 1857 or 1858, a pound-and-a-half model was able to fly briefly and land.
  Francis Herbert Wenham presented the first paper to the newly formed Aeronautical Society (later the Royal Aeronautical Society), On Aerial Locomotion. He took Cayley's work on cambered wings further, making important findings about both the wing aerofoil section and lift distribution. To test his ideas, from 1858 he constructed several gliders, both manned and unmanned, and with up to five stacked wings. He concluded correctly that long, thin wings would be better than the bat-like ones suggested by many, because they would have more leading edge for their area. Today this relationship is known as the aspect ratio of a wing.
  The latter part of the 19th century became a period of intense study, characterized by the "gentleman scientists" who represented most research efforts until the 20th century. Among them was the British scientist-philosopher and inventor Matthew Piers Watt Boulton, who wrote an important paper in 1864, On Aërial Locomotion, which also described lateral flight control. He was the first to patent an aileron control system in 1868.
  In 1864, Le Comte Ferdinand Charles Honore Phillipe d'Esterno published a study On the Flight of Birds (Du Vol des Oiseaux), and the next year Louis Pierre Mouillard published an influential book The Empire of the Air (l'Empire de l'Air).
  1866 saw the founding of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain and two years later the world's first aeronautical exhibition was held at the Crystal Palace, London, where Stringfellow was awarded a £100 prize for the steam engine with the best power-to-weight ratio.
  In 1871, Wenham and Browning made the first wind tunnel. Members of the Society used the tunnel and learned that cambered wings generated considerably more lift than expected by Cayley's Newtonian reasoning, with lift-to-drag ratios of about 5:1 at 15 degrees. This clearly demonstrated the possibility of building practical heavier-than-air flying machines: what remained were the problems of controlling and powering the craft.
  Alphonse Pénaud, a Frenchman living from 1850 to 1880, made significant contributions to aeronautics. He advanced the theory of wing contours and aerodynamics and constructed successful models of aeroplanes, helicopters and ornithopters. In 1871, he flew the first aerodynamically stable fixed-wing aeroplane, a model monoplane he called the "Planophore", a distance of 40 metres (130 ft). Pénaud's model incorporated several of Cayley's discoveries, including the use of a tail, wing dihedral for inherent stability, and rubber power. The planophore also had longitudinal stability, being trimmed such that the tailplane was set at a smaller angle of incidence than the wings, an original and important contribution to the theory of aeronautics.
  By the 1870s, lightweight steam engines had been developed enough for their experimental use in aircraft.
  Félix du Temple eventually achieved a short hop with a full-size manned craft in 1874. His "Monoplane" was a large aircraft made of aluminium, with a wingspan of 42 ft 8 in (13 m) and a weight of 
caption: The Aéroplane of Victor Tatin, 1879.
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