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Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet ( 27 December 1773 – 15 December 1857 ) was an exuberant English Polymath from Brompton-by-Sawdon , near Scarborough in Yorkshire . He pioneered the study of Aerodynamics over four decades before the development of Powered Flight . He served for the Whig party in Parliament , and helped found the '' Polytechnic Institution '', serving as its chairman for many years. He was a distant cousin of the Mathematician Arthur Cayley . Cayley inherited Brompton Hall and its estates on the death of his father, the 5th baronet Cayley. Captured by the optimism of the times, he engaged in a wide variety of Engineering projects. Among the many things that he invented are self-righting Life-boat s, Tension-spoke Wheel s, the " Universal Railway " (his term for Caterpillar Tractors ), automatic signals for railway crossings, Seat Belt s, experimental designs for Helicopter s, and a kind of prototypical Internal Combustion Engine fuelled by Gunpowder . He also contributed in the fields of Prosthetic s, Heat Engine s, Electricity , Theatre Architecture , Ballistics , Optics and Land Reclamation . He is mainly remembered, however, for his for Lateral Stability in flight, and deliberately set the Centre Of Gravity of many of his models well below the wings for this reason. Investigating many other theoretical aspects of flight, many now acknowledge him as the first Aeronautical Engineer . By wings towards the front, with a smaller tailplane at the back comprising Horizontal Stabiliser s and a Vertical Fin . Eventually he designed one large enough to carry a Pilot . After demonstrating that animals could fly in it safely, in the summer of 1853 he persuaded his coachman to fly it. Launched from a hill on the Brompton Estate by teams of estate workers, Cayley's coachman flew the machine 130 metres across Brompton Dale, landing safely into a meadow on the other side. This was the earliest recorded manned, heavier-than-air flight. A replica of the machine was flown at the original site in Brompton Dale in 1974 and in the mid 1980s by Derek Piggott (right). Another replica flew there in 2003 , first piloted by Allan McWhirter and later by Richard Branson . SEE ALSO
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