s a Whig magnate,
and amused his leisure with science, till his death in 1857.

Cayley's work is difficult to assess. He had all the right ideas, though
the means of putting them into practice did not lie ready to his hand.
If he had been a poor man, he might have gone farther. He designed, so
to say, both an airship and an aeroplane; there was no one to execute
his designs, and the scheme fell through. He more than once anticipated
later inventions, but he put nothing on the market. His mind was fertile
in mechanical devices, so that if one proved troublesome, he could
always turn his attention to another. He is content to enunciate a
truth, and to call it probable. 'Probably', he says, in discussing
engines of small weight and high power, 'a much cheaper engine of this
sort might be produced by a gas-light apparatus and by firing the
inflammable air generated with a due portion of common air under a
piston.' This is an exact forecast of the engine used to-day in all
flying machines. He has some good remarks on the shape that offers least
resistance to the air in passing through it, that is, on the doctrine of
the streamline. He knew that the shape of the hinder part of a solid
body which travels through the air is of as much importance as the shape
of the fore-part in diminishing resistance. He does not seem to have
known that it is of more importance. He knew that the resistance of the
air acting on concave wings, or planes, at a small angle of incidence
was resolved chiefly into lift, and he suspected that the amount of the
lift was greater than the mathematical theory of his day allowed. Above
all, his treatise is stimulating, and suggests further inquiry and
experiment along lines which have since proved to be the right lines.

Cayley's ideas were developed in practice by John Stringfellow, a
manufacturer of lace machinery at Chard, in Somersetshire, and by his
friend W. S. Henson, a young engineer. They constructed a light
steam-engine, and designed an aeroplane, of which they entertained such
high hopes that they took out a patent, and applied to Parliament for an
Act to incorporate an Aerial Steam Transit Company. The reaction of
public opinion on their proposals took the form of drag rather than
lift, and they were thrown back on their own resources. In 1847 they
made a model aeroplane, twenty feet in span, driven by two four-bladed
airscrews, three feet in diameter, and they experimented with it on Bala
Down