Silver Disc Machine

Silver Disc machine, image of an aircraft engraved on a medallion by Sir George Cayley in 1799 with his initials to commemorate his conception of a powered aircraft.

The Science Museum of London preserves a small silver disc, engraved by Cayley, representing the first modern conception of an airplane. The obverse of the disc, signed with the initials GRC and dated 1799, features an aircraft with a fixed wing mounted over a boatlike fuselage, an all-moving cruciform tail to the rear, and flappers for propulsion. This was no ornithopter or medieval flapping-wing machine, though. Cayley was the first to suggest that an airplane would be a machine with separate systems for lift, drag, and thrust. The reverse of the disc features a diagram of the forces acting on a wing in flight. Taken together, the two engravings represent Cayley’s solution to his own definition of the problem of flight, “to make a surface support a given weight by the application of power to the resistance of air.”

Cayley’s early thinking led him in 1804 to the construction of a hand-launched glider with a kite-surface wing totaling 5 square feet (about 0.5 square metre). As the English aeronautical historian C.H. Gibbs-Smith has noted, the tests of this glider represented the first “true aeroplane flight” in history. Cayley continued to publish on aeronautics and to design and build experimental machines almost to the end of his life. Two of those craft, constructed in 1849 and 1853, may actually have carried human beings into the air on short glides. See also flight, history of.