Abu al-Qasim Abbas ibn Firnas ibn Wirdas al-Takurini (Arabic: أبو القاسم عباس بن فرناس بن ورداس التاكرني; c. 809/810 – 887 A.D.), also known as Abbas ibn Firnas (Arabic: عباس ابن فرناس) was an Andalusi polymath:[1][2][3] an inventor, astronomer, physician, chemist, engineer, Andalusi musician, and Arabic-language poet.[3] He was reported to have experimented with unpowered flight.[1][4][5][6]
Ibn Firnas made various contributions in the field of astronomy and engineering. He constructed a device which indicated the motion of the planets and stars in the Universe. In addition, ibn Firnas came up with a procedure to manufacture colourless glass and made magnifying lenses for reading, which were known as reading stones.[5][6]
Origin
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Abbas ibn Firnas was born in Ronda, in the Takurunna province and lived in Córdoba.[7] His ancestors participated in the Muslim conquest of Spain.[8] His full name was "Abu al-Qasim Abbas ibn Firnas ibn Wirdas al-Takurini", although he is better known as Abbas ibn Firnas. There is very little biographical information on him. While the majority of sources describe him as a Umayyad mawlā (client) of Berber origin,[9][10][11] some sources describe him as Arab.[12][unreliable source?][13][unreliable source?]
Work
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Abbas Ibn Firnas devised a means of manufacturing colorless glass, invented various glass planispheres, made corrective lenses ("reading stones"), devised a chain of things that could be used to simulate the motions of the planets and stars, and developed a process for cutting rock crystal that allowed Al-Andalus to cease exporting quartz to Egypt to be cut.[5][6] He introduced the Sindhind to Al-Andalus,[1] which had important influence on astronomy in Europe.[14] He also designed the al-Maqata, a water clock,[15] and a prototype for a kind of metronome.[16][17]
Aviation
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Some seven centuries after the death of Firnas, the Algerian historian Ahmad al-Maqqari (d. 1632) wrote a description of Firnas that included the following:[18]
Among other very curious experiments which he made, one is his trying to fly. He covered himself with feathers for the purpose, attached a couple of wings to his body, and, getting on an eminence, flung himself down into the air, when according to the testimony of several trustworthy writers who witnessed the performance, he flew a considerable distance, as if he had been a bird, but, in alighting again on the place whence he had started, his back was very much hurt, for not knowing that birds when they alight come down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one.[6]
Al-Maqqari is said to have used in his history works "many early sources no longer extant", but in the case of Firnas, he does not cite his sources for the details of the reputed flight, though he does claim that one verse in a ninth-century Arab poem is actually an allusion to Firnas's flight. The poem was written by Mu'min ibn Said, a court poet of Córdoba under Muhammad I (d. 886), amir of the Emirate of Córdoba, who was acquainted with and usually critical of ibn Firnas.[6] The pertinent verse runs: "He flew faster than the phoenix in his flight when he dressed his body in the feathers of a vulture."[18] No other surviving sources refer to the event.[19]
It has been suggested that ibn Firnas's attempt at glider flight might have inspired the attempt by Eilmer of Malmesbury between 1000 and 1010 in England,[20] but there is no evidence supporting this hypothesis.[6]
Armen Firman
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Armen Firman is the Latinized name of Abbas Ibn Firnas.[21]
According to some secondary sources, about 20 years before Ibn Firnas attempted to fly he may have witnessed Firman as he wrapped himself in a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts and jumped from a tower in Córdoba, intending to use the garment 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.[5]
However, there is no reference to Armen Firman in other secondary sources, all of which deal exhaustively with Ibn Firnas' flight attempt.[6][22][23] Armen Firman is not mentioned in al-Maqqari's account.[5]
As this story was recorded only in a single primary source, al-Maqqari,[6] and since Firman's jump is said to have been Ibn Firnas' source of inspiration,[5] the lack of any mention of Firman in al-Maqqari's account may point to synthesis, the tower jump later confused with Ibn Firnas' gliding attempt in secondary writings.[5]
Legacy
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In 1973, a statue of Ibn Firnas by the sculptor Badri al-Samarrai was installed at the Baghdad International Airport in Iraq.[24] In 1976, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved of naming a crater on the moon after him as Ibn Firnas.[25] In 2011, one of the bridges going over the Guadalquivir river in Córdoba, Spain, was named the "Abbas Ibn Firnás Bridge".[26] A British one-plane airline, Firnas Airways, was also named after him.[27]
See also
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References
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Sources
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Further reading
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The dream of human flight must have begun with observation of birds soaring through the sky. For millennia, however, progress was retarded by attempts to design aircraft that emulated the beating of a bird’s wings. The generations of experimenters and dreamers who focused their attention on ornithopters—machines in which flapping wings generated both lift and propulsion—contributed nothing substantial to the final solution of the problems blocking the route to mechanical flight.
Thus, the story of the invention of the airplane begins in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, with the first serious research into aerodynamics—the study of the forces operating on a solid body (for instance, a wing when it is immersed in a stream of air). Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei in Italy, Christiaan Huygens in the Netherlands, and Isaac Newton in England all contributed to an understanding of the relationship between resistance (drag) and such factors as the surface area of an object exposed to the stream and the density of a fluid. Swiss mathematicians Daniel Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler and British engineer John Smeaton explained the relationship between pressure and velocity and provided information that enabled a later generation of engineers to calculate aerodynamic forces.
George Cayley's glider, 1853English aeronautic pioneer George Cayley established the modern notion of a fixed-wing aircraft in 1799, and he designed a glider (shown in the drawing) that was safely flown by his reluctant servant in 1853 in the first recorded successful manned flight.
George Cayley, an English baronet, bridged the gap between physical theory, engineering research, and the age-old dream of flight. He gathered critical aerodynamic data of value in the design of winged aircraft, using instruments developed in the 18th century for research into ballistics. Cayley was also a pioneer of aircraft design, explaining that a successful flying machine would have separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control. While he did produce designs for ornithopters, he was the first experimenter to focus on fixed-wing aircraft.
Cayley found the secrets of lift in the shape of a bird’s wing, surmising that an arched, or cambered, wing would produce greater lift than a flat wing because of lower pressure on top of the curved surface (see Bernoulli’s theorem). His observations of birds in flight led him to recognize the superiority of relatively long and narrow (in modern terminology, high-aspect-ratio) wings for soaring. As a practical matter, however, he designed biplane and multiplane wings (the first of their kind) as a means of providing maximum surface area in a strong and easily braced structure.
Addressing the first meeting of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1866, Francis H. Wenham provided a concise and forceful restatement of Cayley’s most important ideas regarding wings. Five years later, in cooperation with John Browning, Wenham built the first wind tunnel, a device that would have a profound effect on the study of wings and the development of improved airfoils. Horatio Phillips, a fellow member of the Aeronautical Society, developed an even more effective wind tunnel design, and he patented (1884) a two-surface, cambered-airfoil design that provided the foundation for most subsequent work in the field.
Lilienthal gliderGerman aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal piloting one of his gliders, c. 1895.
Beginning in the 1870s, Otto Lilienthal, a German mechanical engineer, undertook the most important studies of wing design since the time of Cayley. His detailed measurements of the forces operating on a cambered wing at various angles of attack provided precise bits of data employed by later experimenters—including, in the United States, the engineer Octave Chanute and the Wright brothers—to calculate the performance of their own wings. Having published the results of his research, Lilienthal designed, built, and flew a series of monoplane and biplane gliders, completing as many as 2,000 flights between 1890 and the time of his fatal glider crash in August 1896.
At the outset of their own aeronautical experiments, the Wright brothers carefully studied the work of their predecessors and decided that there was little need for them to focus on wing design. “Men already know how to construct wings…,” Wilbur explained in 1901, “which when driven through the air at sufficient speed will not only sustain themselves but also that of the engine, and of the engineer as well.”
Wright gliderWilbur Wright executes a banking turn to the right in the Wright brothers' first fully controllable glider, at the Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, October 24, 1902.
Two years of experimenting with gliders, however, demonstrated the need to pay considerably more attention to wing design. Beginning in November 1901, the Wright brothers used a wind tunnel of their own design to gather information that enabled them to calculate the values of lift and drag for an entire series of airfoils at various angles of attack and to measure the performance of wings with differing aspect ratios, tip shapes, and other design features. That information culminated in the Wright glider of 1902, a breakthrough machine whose wing design enabled the Wright brothers to take the final steps to the invention of the airplane.