One of my many interests since childhood has been postage stamps from around the world. While developing some pages for a colored stamp collector's album I have been working on for years that will include stamps from Cambodia (now the country of Kampuchea), I came upon this stamp issued in 1987 shown on the website icao.int.

It is a picture of a flying machine designed by Sir George Cayley of England in 1843. It immediately reminded me of the drones my granddaughter's class built in high school almost 180 years later.

I had to find out about this nobleman who preceded the Wright Brothers by nearly a century so I went to Wikipedia.

 

 

Sir Cayley lived from 1773-1857. He is considered by experts to be the first person to identify the four forces controlling the ability of heavier than air craft to fly: weight, lift, drag and thrust. He also proposed cambered wings so that air passing over the wing travels faster than the air under the wing creating the lift force.

His primary interest was in the possibility of vertical takeoff vehicles like helicopters and modern day drones. Later designers of heavier than air craft, like the Wright brothers used his ideas, which are still fundamental to modern design. Even rockets must use these principals although thrust has become the most important in order to escape gravity. Once outside our atmosphere weight and thrust become the essential elements.

He would be a modern Rip Van Winkle if he could see how modern aviation and space travel have developed.

The moral of this story is simple: when you chance upon something new, take some time out of your busy schedule to find out more. Knowledge is fun, interesting, enlightening and potentially powerful and will broaden your horizons.

~ Raymond Leo Blain