M.Goodall, A.Tagg British Aircraft before the Great War (Schiffer)
Deleted by request of (c)Schiffer Publishing
CAYLEY GLIDERS (Sir George Cayley, 1773-1857. Brompton Hall, near Scarborough, Yorkshire)
Sir George Cayley was a scientist and inventor in a number of fields and included aeronautics among his studies. In articles in various journals he described the principles and configuration of the aeroplane. Much of his work is recorded in his notebooks, which have survived, and he is internationally regarded as the inventor of the aeroplane in its basic form. Apart from his designs for gliders, he published a scheme to a 'borrowed' theory for a double rotor helicopter in 1842. He realized the need for a source of lightweight power other than manpower and experimented with a gunpowder engine, but none of the craft actually constructed was fitted with an engine.
His known designs of full size gliders, realized over a period of forty-two years were flown mostly with ballast, but later a boy and finally a man, his coachman, were carried aloft.
CAYLEY monoplane glider No.1, 1809
This machine, which had a wing area of 300 sq ft and a loaded weight of 140 lb, was fitted with a tail unit with adjustable rudder. The glides were initiated by towing and, in some, ballast was carried, although in certain conditions the lift generated was sufficient to carry the man or boy towing the machine into the air.
CAYLEY triplane glider No.2,1849.
A sketch of this triplane glider was found by C.H. Gibbs-Smith in 1961. It was operated mainly with ballast, but carried a boy on a few occasions for short glides.
The triplane wing structure was extended aft to carry a cruciform tail unit and a boat shaped nacelle was carried on struts below. The whole machine rested on three lightweight wooden wheels. Control was provided by a second cruciform tail unit on a pole at the rear of the nacelle and by adjustment of the upper elevator by cords from the nacelle. Two wings of 6 ft span were also fitted for control by the pilot, so that Cayley could observe their effect on the glide angle.
Data
Wing area 338 sq ft
Weight 130lb
CAYLEY monoplane glider No.3,1853
Also referred to as possibly a biplane or triplane, this monoplane design was described as 'a Governable Parachute' and information on it was published in Mechanics Magazine of 25 September 1852. This is believed to be the version tested in 1853 which made the first known manned glider flight of some 500 yards across Brompton Dale. Apart from the use of a monoplane lifting surface, the general layout was similar in most respects to the 1849 glider. The empty weight was 165 lb.
Subsequent to the finding of Sir George's notebooks in the 1960s, a reproduction of this machine was constructed. This was towed or launched by bungee when flown for filming purposes, prior to being housed in the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester.
P.Lewis British Aircraft 1809-1914 (Putnam)
Cayley 1809 Glider
Following his experiments with models and the consequent establishment of a practical form of man-carrying aircraft, Sir George Cayley had by 1809 constructed a full-size glider. The area of the lifting surfaces was 300 sq. ft. and, with a loaded weight of 140 lb., this gave a wing-loading of just under 1/2 lb. sq. ft. Tests at Brompton Hall demonstrated that the machine was quite stable and that it would glide downhill in any direction dictated by its rudder. These trials were unmanned, but Cayley claimed that, when anyone ran forward with it at full speed into a gentle breeze, the glider's lift was so strong that it would often rise and bear the runner aloft for several yards at a stretch. Before further investigations could be carried out with the machine, it was accidentally broken.
Cayley 1849 Glider
Forty years elapsed between the building of Sir George Cayley's full-size unmanned glider of 1809 and his man-carrying glider of 1849. In the interim, many varied ideas for the advancement of the science of flight passed through his fertile mind and were committed to paper in his notebooks.
The details of the form of this later machine are the sole known particulars to have survived of the earliest aircraft constructed with the express intention of carrying a man. An examination of the glider reveals immediately the remarkably high level of practical aerodynamic knowledge which had been reached as a result of his work. The machine was a triplane with a total wing area of 338 sq. ft., the surfaces being set with dihedral to assist lateral stability. The boat-shaped nacelle was suspended below the wings by struts and was braced with wires. The glider rested on an undercarriage of three tension wheels, two of which were at the front, while the third was at the rear. Longitudinal stability was ensured by a fixed tail plane and fin, the complete unit being mounted at the trailing-edge of the centre wings and adjusted in incidence by cords from the nacelle. Control in flight was effected by a duplicate combined elevator and rudder mounted below the upper unit and pivoted at the rear of the nacelle, operation being by the pilot's hand on the lever to which it was attached. Two levers, fitted vertically in front of the pilot, were connected to a pair of smaller flapping wings, each of 6 ft. span, which Cayley designed for the purpose of observing their effect on the gliding angle.
During 1849, the triplane glider was flown at Brompton Hall unmanned in ballast, and also succeeded in gliding several yards downhill with a ten-year-old boy on board on two occasions. In his notes made a few years after the event, Cayley refers to the machine as "the old flyer”. Weight empty, about 130 lb.
Cayley 1853 Glider
Sir George Cayley's glider of 1853 represented the culmination of some sixty years investigation into the realm of flight, which earned for him recognition as the inventor of the aeroplane in the form in which it finally evolved. The exact details of this machine remain to be determined, but it is understood to have been not a monoplane but either a biplane or a triplane, with the triplane the likeliest layout for the wings. The rest of the airframe is believed to have followed closely that of the 1849 glider, and to distinguish the later aircraft from the earlier, it is referred to in the Cayley notes as "the new flyer '.
In 1853 Cayley persuaded his coachman to make the first known manned gliding flight, which covered a distance of some 500 yards across the small valley at Brompton Hall, the family seat near Scarborough, Yorks. Weight empty, about 165 lb.
A.Andrews. The Flying Machine: Its Evolution through the Ages (Putnam)
In 1799 Sir George Cayley, at the age of 25, engraved a silver disk with the sketch of a flying machine manned by a pilot sitting between the cambered wings of a biplane that has tailplanes and fin in one unit shaped like a paper dart. It is the most significant single design in the whole history of the development of flight, for in one stroke it casts the matrix for future practical aircraft. It has aeroplanes, ie, fixed wings, a concept unique at that time, for it concedes that all the effort of past centuries spent in flapping artificial wings in imitation of birds flying (not soaring) is renounced. The problem of lift is isolated from preoccupation with thrust, and is tackled by the fixed wings and the angle they make with fluid air. The problem of thrust is likewise isolated and passed over to a method of separate propulsion - in this case not a power engine but a pair of broad paddles which the pilot is rowing remotely through levers by pulling on oar-handles. The tail is a separate unit on a universal joint, adjustable by the pilot for steering, and it is of a cruciform kite shape - a tail unit construction that Cayley did not fundamentally change in the 56 years during which he continued to experiment. The radical revolution, from an aeronautical point of view, is that the ornithopter is abandoned and the designer has adopted the aerodynamic principle of the kite.
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Cayley had sent a boy for a few feet into the air in 1849, but not in free flight. He used a full-size aeroplane, designed as the triplane he had recommended at the time of the Henson controversy six years earlier. He was at the same time very preoccupied with developing the hot-air engine, but he did not install it in the glider. Instead he fitted the car with flappers'with which the pilot was supposed to row to glory. Glory of a sort did come. Cayley recorded: ‘A boy of about ten years of age was floated off the ground for several yards on descending the hill, and also for about the same space by some persons pulling the apparatus against a very slight breeze by a rope.’
In 1853, using another full-size machine, which he called his New Flyer, Cayley and his ground crew moved on to the east side of the deep dale behind Brompton Hall, his country home. He requested his coachman to occupy the car, which was equipped with handles to work flappers and levers to brake the undercarriage wheels. The machine was hustled down the hill until it was launched into the air. It sailed across the valley, well stabilised because of Cayley’s previous trimming of the craft, and not immediately put out of kilter by the coachman’s frenzied manipulation of the flappers. It landed, after a flight of some 500yd, not so neatly as might have been hoped, hitting the opposite side of the dale and overturning the car. The ground crew rushed across to free the coachman from the debris, but old Cayley, knowing he was not spry enough to keep up with them, took his time. Consequently the coachman, once he had been set solidly on his feet, had to cup his hands to shout across the valley his reaction to this historic occasion. The bellowed message was: ‘Please, Sir George, I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, and not to fly.’
Four and a half years later Cayley was dead, having spent the interim designing an even more complex machine than any he had yet suggested. With the exception of the provision of an adequate engine, the key to almost all the aeronautical problems that presented themselves between his death and the Wrights’ triumph was tucked, not too obscurely, within the records and statements of his work. But he was forgotten almost immediately. For the next 50 years individual inventors were pecking away at problems he had already largely investigated and solved.
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A.Andrews - The Flying Maschine: Its Evolution through the Ages /Putnam/
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Qantas reconstruction of Cayley’s ‘boy carrier’, or Old Flyer, the triplane in which he floated a ten-year-old off the ground in 1849, the first time a human being had left the ground in a heavier-than-air machine. The wing-span was 10ft, overall length and height 20ft.
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M.Goodall, A.Tagg - British Aircraft before the Great War /Schiffer/
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A.Andrews - The Flying Maschine: Its Evolution through the Ages /Putnam/
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Sir George Cayley’s model glider of 1804, seen here in accurate reconstruction, offered roughly twice the wing area, and had its cruciform tail unit set at a positive angle of 11 1/2 degrees to the rod forming the main horizontal beam, and the kite-form mainplane set at 6 degrees to this beam. Cayley wrote, with some exaggeration, that with this configuration ‘it would proceed uniformly in a right line for ever’. Penaud’s Planophore, which did not ‘proceed for ever’ but did fly 131ft in 11 seconds before the gravest technical witnesses, enshrined in the minds of the French, who were the most serious aircraft designers in Europe, the ideal of predominant equilibrium, or inherent stability, which culminated in the BE2c of Great Britain.
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P.Lewis - British Aircraft 1809-1914 /Putnam/
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Sir George Cayley's 1849 triplane glider flown briefly with light loads. A sketch made by Cayley in 1853, depicting his boy-carrying triplane glider. Note the propulsive flappers and the pilot-operated cruciform tail unit aft of the car. The tail unit attached to the wings was not moveable.
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M.Goodall, A.Tagg - British Aircraft before the Great War /Schiffer/
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Cayley's 'Governable Parachute' monoplane glider of 1852-1853 which made a manned flight of 500 yards.
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M.Goodall, A.Tagg - British Aircraft before the Great War /Schiffer/
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M.Goodall, A.Tagg - British Aircraft before the Great War /Schiffer/
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Cayley experimental moving wing glider.
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A.Andrews - The Flying Maschine: Its Evolution through the Ages /Putnam/
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Cayley’s design, engraved on a silver disk, of his first aeroplane - a fixed-wing biplane with a kite-form tail unit. The aircraft is propelled by paddles, graphically separating thrust from lift.
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