Forget Newton. You want to know who made revolutionary discoveries and advanced numerous concepts that we know today?
The First Flying Contraption
A thousand years before the Wright brothers invented the flying machine, Abbas Ibn Firnas — inventor, physician, chemist, engineer, musician, poet — successfully invented the first heavier-than-air flying contraption to be recorded in history.
He also accidentally invented a precursor to the parachute, in 852, when he jumped off the minaret of the Grand Mosque of Cordoba with a cloak tightened with wooden struts. He didn’t fly then, but the cloth slowed his descent, as a parachute would.
It was in 875, when he was 70 years old, that he constructed his glider and stayed airborne for 10 whole minutes, and then crash-landed. It is assumed that his experiments served as an inspiration to Leonardo Da Vinci’s numerous drawings of flying devices.
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