When did Man achieve flight for the first time? The question can be nuanced because one would need to specify if it refers to free flight or powered flight; it’s curious that in both cases, the answer is a pair of brothers, the Montgolfier or the Wright brothers, respectively. But to get to them, a long list of pioneers was needed, and one who would deserve recognition on his own merits was Abbas Ibn Firnas, who was Andalusi, specifically from Ronda (nowadays Spain).

I suppose everyone knows the story of Icarus: the son Daedalus had with Naucrae, a slave of King Minos of Crete, whom he fell in love with while building a labyrinth for the monarch to imprison his son, the famous Minotaur.

After finishing the construction, Minos ordered their confinement on the island to prevent them from revealing the labyrinth’s exit. However, Daedalus crafted wings for both by attaching bird feathers with wax, and they escaped by flying. Unfortunately, Icarus ended up dying in the sea because, at too high an altitude, the sun melted the wax on his wings.

The flight of Lagâri Hasan Çelebi/Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

This myth is primarily a moralizing fable about the danger of aspiring to be equal to the gods, somewhat akin to the Tower of Babel. But it also reflects the ancient human desire to conquer the sky, a realm for which humans were not naturally equipped, making it, as Isaac Asimov said, the culmination of their development.

A testament to this obsessive endeavor, despite its apparent impossibility, is the evidence of various attempts in places as distant as Ancient Greece, China, the Iberian Peninsula, or Turkey (where Lagâri Hasan Çelebi used a rocket and wings to fly over the Golden Horn in 1633!).

One such figure is Archytas of Tarentum, a sage who lived between the 4th and 5th centuries BCE, a contemporary of Plato. He crafted what he called the perisfera, a contraption shaped like a bird that, according to accounts, could fly a couple of hundred meters by harnessing the power of air, though the details of its generation remain unknown. A century later, the invention of the Kong Ming Lantern is attributed to the Chinese military strategist Zhuhe Liang, a paper balloon similar to modern lanterns, used to scare the enemy.

The lanterns of oriental festivals are today’s version of the KA Lantern/Image: Takeway on Wikimedia Commons

The Chinese also developed kites around the same time, which provides a differential aspect. Some confusing accounts suggest that in the 6th century CE, certain kite models were designed to allow humans to glide. Emperor Gao Yang reportedly forced prisoners to jump from a tower, and at least one, Yuan Huangtou, the son of a former ruler, survived one of these attempts (though he was later executed). If true, this would constitute the first attempt to conquer the air personally.

However, there was a distinction between forced flight and voluntary flight for research purposes. To explore this further, we need to move forward in history to the Middle Ages and focus more closely, geographically speaking, on the Emirate of Córdoba in 9th-century Al-Andalus. Here, we encounter the extraordinary figure of Abu al-Qāsim Abbās ibn Firnās, better known by his simplified name Abbas Ibn Firnas, who fully embodied the spirit of Icarus, from attempting flight to the final outcome (though he was luckier, as we’ll see).

Ibn Firnas was born in Izn-Rand Onda (present-day Ronda, province of Málaga, Spain) between 809 and 810 CE, descended from a Berber family that likely arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in the previous century during the collapse of the Visigothic kingdom. His surname, Afernas, is quite common in present-day Algeria. Like scholars of his time, he mastered various disciplines, from astronomy and medicine to chemistry, alchemy, and astrology (considered sciences at that time). He also excelled in other areas expected of cultured individuals of that era, such as philosophy, music, and poetry.

Extension of the emirate of Cordoba in the 9th century/Image: Crates on Wikimedia Commons

Another aspect of his expertise relevant here is engineering, which enabled him to create some curious inventions: al-Maqata-Maqata (an anaphoric water clock indicating daytime and nighttime hours), a method for carving quartz (avoiding the need to send it to Egypt, where carving was common), a complex armillary sphere, what he called “reading stones” (corrective lenses), a method for producing colorless glass (applied in Cordoban furnaces), a planetarium with visual and auditory effects in his own home… Additionally, he deciphered the Arabic metric treatise compiled by the philologist Jalil ibn Ahmad.

He also introduced the Zīj al-Sindhind or Great Astronomical Tables of the Sindhind to the Iberian Peninsula. This astronomical manual, originally written in Sanskrit and imported to Baghdad around 770 CE by Caliph Al-Mansur, was translated into Arabic by the renowned translator Muhammad al-Fazari. The work facilitated calculations of the movements of all known celestial bodies at the time (sun, moon, planets) and provided abundant information for establishing the calendar. Its arrival in Europe would prove significant for later Western scientists.

This multifaceted activity made Ibn Firnas a true precursor to Leonardo da Vinci (he was nicknamed Hakim Al Andalus, the Wise of Al Andalus) and gained him access to the court of Abd ar-Rahman II, where he taught poetry accompanied by the lute. At that time, the Emirate of Córdoba was a cultural and technological reference, replacing parchment with paper, introducing novel crops (rice, sugar, lemon, watermelon…), documenting the use of the magnetic needle for the first time, and employing a new numbering system that displaced the Roman system and is still in use today. In this context, the warning issued by the Sevillian scholar Ibn Abdun is situated:

Books on science should not be sold to Jews or Christians, except those that deal with their law because they later translate scientific books and attribute them to their own and their bishops, even though they are Muslim works.

Stamp issued by Correos dedicated to Abbas Ibn Firnas

It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the airports in the capital of Iraq is named after Abbas Ibn Firnas, as well as a crater on the Moon, one of the bridges crossing the Guadalquivir River in Córdoba, and the Astronomical and Meteorological Center of Ronda. His image also appears on postage stamps in several countries, including Spain. Moreover, the Christian world expressed admiration for his wisdom by Latinizing his name as Armen Firman.

Today, some argue that they were two different people, and Firman inspired Ibn Firnas in his childhood with the idea of flying, having conducted a flight test that the Andalusi later imitated. However, the dates do not align; this would have happened in 852 CE, and by then, Ibn Firnas was not a child but well into his forties, making him considerably older. Additionally, the main source on his life is the 17th-century Algerian historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari, who does not mention Firman, despite claiming to have consulted “many of the early sources now lost”.

Al-Maqqari states:

Among many other strange experiments he made, one was the attempt to fly. For that purpose, he covered himself with feathers and attached his body to a pair of wings. He climbed a tower and threw himself into the air, according to the testimony of several trustworthy chroniclers who witnessed the event. He flew a considerable distance like a bird, but upon landing back where he had started, his back hurt a lot because he didn’t know that birds use their tails to descend, and he forgot to add one.

In other words, Ibn Firnas crafted wings from wood covered with silk, adorned with feathers from birds of prey, resembling a sort of delta wing similar to those Leonardo would draw centuries later. He then climbed to the top of the now-vanished palace of Arruzafa (presumably located on a slope of Mount Yabal al-Arusy, near where Medina Azahara would later be built) and, in front of a large crowd invited for the occasion, jumped into the abyss, managing to stay in the air long enough to go down in history.

It was a success if he did indeed fly for ten minutes, as is often read. However, he was not entirely satisfied because the landing was more violent than anticipated, and besides the back pain, he broke both legs. As the text mentions, he later realized that he should have incorporated a tail like that of birds into his contraption for stability and reduced speed.

The flight of Ibn Firnas at an exhibition in Doha / photo Girish Gavandi on Flickr

Perhaps he did not do so because of his previous experiment, the one in 852, at the age of forty-two, which is presumed to have inspired Armen Firman in his childhood for the idea of flying. However, as we have seen, Firman was likely Ibn Firnas himself. It happened when he jumped from a minaret of the Cordoban mosque using a large canvas attached to a wooden frame as a parachute. He suffered some bruises upon landing but nothing significant, making this the first successfully documented parachute experience in history.

The subsequent flight was in 875, when he was sixty-two. He lived twelve more years, passing away at a very advanced age in 887 in Córdoba. Other inventors followed in his footsteps, with the first, according to some authors, being the English Benedictine Elmer of Malmesbury, who in the early years of the second millennium purportedly covered about two hundred meters with a contraption similar to that of the Andalusi. Another British monk, Roger Bacon, revisited Archimedes’ studies on the relationship between solids and fluids to theorize about a machine that could float in the air as ships do in water.

The cruel verse dedicated to Ibn Firnas by a lesser-known Cordoban rhapsodist who knew him personally, Mu’min ibn Said, does not reflect the significance of that adventure, the memory of which has endured to this day. Ibn Said was his adversary at court, and hence the tone is mocking. Paradoxically, it contributed to immortalizing him because it constitutes the only preserved source on Ibn Firnas’ flight, apart from the one mentioned earlier.

He wanted to surpass the griffin in his flight, and only carried on his body the feathers of an old vulture!

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on December 17, 2018. Puedes leer la versión en español en Abbás Ibn Firnás, el sabio andalusí que inventó el paracaídas y unas alas para volar

Sources

Lynn Townsend White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays | John Gill, Andalucia: A Cultural History | Científicos de Al-Ándalus: Abbás Ibn Firnás | Naeem Ali, Abbas Ibn Firnas: The World’s First Pilot | Wikipedia

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