Nineteenth Century Experiments
In the early part of the last century an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, made many experiments with gliders and tabulated with great care the results of his investigations. He concluded, like Swedenborg, that man has not the power to fly by his own strength through any wing-flapping device, or orthopter, but he intimated that with a lighter and more powerful engine than had then been invented a plane like those used in his gliders, if slightly inclined upward, might be made gradually to ascend through the air. The results of his experiments he published in 1810. They clearly foreshadowed the triumph that came almost a century later.
In 1844 two British inventors, Henson and String-fellow, working out the suggestions of Cayley, made an aeroplane model equipped with a steam engine which is said to have made a flight of forty yards--the first real upward flight of a heavier than air machine on record. This model was a monoplane, that is, the lifting surface was a single plane like the outstretched wings of a bird. Twenty-two years later experiments were made with a biplane, that is, an aeroplane with two lifting planes or surfaces, one above the other.