The world’s first aeroplane was designed and built at Brompton, England, a village ten miles west of Scarborough. The name of the man who undertook this task was Sir George Cayley (1773 - 1857) who lived at Brompton Hall.

George Cayley was born in Scarborough in 1773 and was always inquisitive. As a teenager he had measured how fast his thumb nail grew and discovered that it took one hundred days to grow half an inch (13 mm). He inherited the title of baronet on the death of his father, together with Brompton Hall and its land. Being a Member of Parliament and a very busy man did not prevent him from applying his mind to other problems. He witness the first railway accident and set about designing a cowcatcher, for locomotives and seat belts for the passengers. He invented the caterpillar tracks a hundred years before David Roberts reinvented them, which were eventually used on tanks and land moving equipment. A gunpowder engine was another of his experiments.

Sir George Cayley
It was the theory of flight where he really excelled. He observed how fast crows flapped their wings in an endeavour to discover how to get lift off the ground and move forward. The consensus of opinion was that a machine would have to flap its wings to get lift and propulsion. George Cayley had observed the seagulls and realised they could get lift by gliding without flapping their wings and that the forward propulsion was a different problem.

Cayley set about investigating lift scientifically. As controlled conditions are required to carry out such experiments, due to wind variance, he chose to carry out these experiments on the staircase at Brompton Hall. His wife did not altogether approve of his experiments in the stairwell of the hall so he waited until she went to stay at her mother’s for the birth of their first baby before starting the tests. So having these controlled conditions he set about building a machine that had a whirling arm to simulated the wing of a bird and also allowed the angle of attack to be varied. He took as his model a crow’s wing and built a wing one foot square (350mm) and found that the best angle of attack was an incline of six degrees. So, using the knowledge that he had gained, he built his first model aircraft which took the form of a glider. The next step was to make a full size version that was able to carry a man.


The workshop and Hall at Brompton by Sawdon
The glider was built in a small stone building attached to the hall that served as George Cayley’s workshop. The aircraft was a flimsy affair as the weight had to be kept to a minimum. The wing was made in the shape of a diamond from linen sheet shaped by cane and held together with string with a tailplane at the back. Below the wing was seat with a three wheel undercarriage. The wheels, to be strong but light, consisted of rims tied to the axle with string and so Cayley had invented the bicycle wheel.

Now a site was required to fly the glider and Cayley chose Brompton Dale as it had a slope at its east end, near some trees. It was now 1853 and Cayley was 79 so he volunteered his coachman John Appleby to be the world’s first test pilot. The pilot sat in the glider and was pulled with ropes by farm workers down the slope until it flew into the air. It flew across the dale some two hundred yards (183 m) before it crashed landed, whereupon the coachman got out and is reputed to have said, “Sir George I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, not to fly.”. John Appleby and Sir George Cayley had made history as the first men to fly and design a heavier than air machine — the aeroplane. This was fifty years before the Wright brothers fixed a propeller to an engine, put it in a glider and flew. © BA Education