Have you ever wondered who was the first person to build a plane?
I know you may be thinking of the 19th-century American engineers, the Wright brothers, who made their historic flight over Kitty Hawk. Not the right brothers.
Not even the 15-year-old Leonardo Da Vinci who sketched out a mechanical flying machine. Guess who?
Origin
Was an Islamic inventor, Abu al-Qasim Abbas ibn Firnas ibn Wirdas al-Takurini. Although he is better known as Abbas ibn Firnas, he was born in Ronda, in the Takurunna province, and lived in Córdoba (809/810–887 CE), during the reign of Muhammad I (d. 886), emirate of Cordoba.
While the majority of sources describe him as a Umayyad mawlā (client) of Berber origin, some sources describe him as Arab.
Abbas ibn Firnas (Arabic: عباس ابن فرناس) was an Andalusi polymath, an inventor, astronomer, physician, chemist, engineer, Andalusi musician, and Arabic-language poet. He was reported to have experimented with an unpowered hang-glider.
He introduced the Western world to the technique for carving rock crystal. He invented an anaphoric clock, which is a complex mechanism that uses water as a liquid engine. Abbas developed the first armillary sphere in Europe that performs calculations and approximate astronomical observations.
Abbas ibn Firnas’ unpowered hang-glider
In the mid-8th century, Abbas ibn Firnas used feathers fastened to silk for wings stiffened with wood struts, creating a bird-like framework. He completed the first historic unpowered hang-glider set for testing! He climbed one of the towers in Córdoba, intending to use the hang-glider as wings on which he could glide.
The alleged attempt at flight was unsuccessful, but the garment slowed his fall enough that he sustained only minor injuries, hurting his tailbone in the landing.
Legacy
In 1973, a statue of Ibn Firnas by the sculptor Badri al-Samarrai was installed at the Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. In 1976, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved of naming a crater on the moon after him as Ibn Firnas.
In 2011, one of the bridges going over the Guadalquivir river in Córdoba, Spain, was named the “Abbas ibn Firnás Bridge.” A British plane airline, Firnas Airways, was also named after him.
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