Abbas ibn Firnas: The First Flight, Centuries Before the Wright Brothers

More than a thousand years before two brothers from Ohio managed it, an elderly man in Cordoba decided he was going to fly. According to the Andalusian accounts, he built himself a set of wings, covered them in feathers and silk, climbed to a high point in front of a crowd he had invited, and threw himself into the air. He glided. For a few moments an old man hung in the sky over ninth-century Spain. Then came the part he had not planned for, which was landing.

The flight

Abbas ibn Firnas lived from about 810 to 887 in the Emirate of Cordoba, and he was the kind of polymath the age produced in numbers: inventor, chemist, astronomer, poet and musician. The story of his flight survives mainly through the seventeenth-century historian al-Maqqari, who drew on earlier Andalusian writers, so the details should be held loosely. By that account he stayed aloft for some distance before crashing and hurting his back. He is said to have remarked afterwards that the fault was his own, because he had studied how birds take off and stay up but had forgotten that they land using their tails, and he had given himself no tail.

A workshop of a mind

Flight was one experiment among many. Ibn Firnas is credited with working out a way to manufacture clear glass from sand and stone, with cutting rock crystal so that Spain no longer had to send it to Egypt to be worked, and with building a planetarium inside his house: a room that simulated the stars and planets, and reportedly the weather, producing clouds and thunder by some mechanism the sources admire but never quite explain. He is also said to have experimented with lenses and with a device for keeping musical time.

The reputation

How much of this is sober fact and how much is the glow that gathers around a remembered genius is impossible to separate now. What is clear is that his own society treated him as a marvel, and that later generations agreed. The International Astronomical Union named a crater on the far side of the Moon after him. An airport near Baghdad and a bridge in Cordoba carry his name. Not bad for a man whose most famous experiment ended with a sore back and a rueful joke about tails.

The Abbas ibn Firnas print is part of the Riwayah Golden Age collection. You can view the print.

Ibn Firnas was a product of Cordoba at its height. For where that came from, see the golden age of Al-Andalus and the Islamic Golden Age as a whole.