Yorkshireman Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was a man ahead of his time. For the want of a suitable engine, he would have invented the powered aircraft; instead it was the glider which successfully made it from his drawing board to the skies in 1849. The pilot, or intrepid passenger, was a 10-year-old boy and, scaling up his experiments, Cayley persuaded a grown man to be carried aloft in his 1853 version.

The story goes that the gentleman was Cayley’s coachman and after the 900ft-long. flight, he promptly resigned! His survival of the glider’s crash-landing was doubtless partly due to the seatbelt which Cayley had thoughtfully designed and added to the wheeled carriage beneath the wings. A galloping horse drew the contraption (which Cayley called a “governable parachute”) to lift-off and one can only imagine the astonishment of any onlookers.

Previously, would-be aviators had tried to imitate birds with flapping wings but Cayley’s extensive research showed that wings should be fixed and he identified, and produced calculations for, lift, weight, thrust and drag as being the key factors. He delved into all forms of aircraft including airships and helicopters, and he laid a foundation just waiting for the technology to catch up decades later.

(Images LtoR: Replica of Cayley’s glider in the Yorkshire Air Museum by Alan Wilson at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0 and Sir George Cayley portrait, Public Domain)

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) from Dorset was a polymath but lacked one skill, namely draughtmanship, and he was even frustrated with his attempts at using tracing devices to make illustrations for his various research papers. Luckily, his knowledge of chemistry enabled him, in the mid-1830s, to invent a method whereby sunlight would imprint an image for him, albeit in negative, on paper coated in salt, then silver nitrate and salt again. He then devised another process to turn this negative into a positive as many times as desired.

He later discovered that exposure need only be a few seconds to create a latent image which could then be developed in a gallic acid mixture. He patented this in 1841 as a ‘calotype’. His friend and fellow polymath, Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) from Buckinghamshire, suggested using hyposulphite of soda as a fixer and this is still used today for black-and-white photography.

Fox Talbot published the first book of photographs, ‘The Pencil of Nature’ (1844) to demonstrate how his “photogenic drawings”, as he called them, could be used. A new type of artistic expression was born, as well as the means for producing authentic historical records. In Talbot’s words, “It is a little bit of magic realised”.

(Images LtoR: Fox Talbot & photograph taken by him in 1842, both at Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)