When did Man first fly? The question can be qualified because it would have to be specified if it refers to free or powered flight; It is curious that in both cases the answer is a pair of brothers, the Montgolfiers or the Wrights respectively. But to reach them, a long list of pioneers was necessary and one of those who would figure on his own merits was Abbás Ibn Firnás, who was also an Andalusian, from Ronda to be exact.
I suppose everyone knows the story of Icarus:the son that Daedalus had with Naucrate, a slave of King Minos of Crete, with whom he fell in love while building a labyrinth for the monarch to confine his offspring, the famous Minotaur.
When the works were finished, Minos decreed their retention on the island so that the exit from the labyrinth would not be disclosed, but Daedalus built wings for each one by gluing bird feathers with wax and both escaped flying, although Icarus ended up dying in the sea because reaching too much altitude the sun melted the wax on theirs.
This myth is, above all, a moralizing fable about the danger of aspiring to equalize the gods, a bit like the Tower of Babel. But it also reflects the ancestral human desire to conquer the sky, a medium for which the human being has not been endowed by Nature and which, therefore, as Isaac Asimov said, constitutes the culmination of his development.
Good proof of this obsessive effort, despite being apparently impossible, is that we have news of several attempts in places as far apart as Ancient Greece, China, the Iberian Peninsula or Turkey (where we have already seen in another article the case of Lagâri Hasan Çelebi, who used a rocket and wings to fly over the Golden Horn in 1633!).
This is the case of Archytas of Tarentum, a wise man who lived between the 4th and 5th centuries BC, a contemporary of Plato, who manufactured what he baptized as perisphere , a device in the shape of a bird that, they say, could fly two hundred meters propelling itself with a jet of air whose origin we do not know. A century later, the Chinese soldier Zhuhe Liang is credited with inventing the so-called Kong Ming Lantern, a tissue paper balloon similar to the current flying lanterns, which was used to scare the enemy.
The Chinese also devised the kite around that time, which is what provides the differential nuance because, according to some confused testimonies, centuries later, in the 6th century AD, some models were designed to allow human beings to glide:Emperor Gao Yang forced prisoners to jump from a tower and it seems that at least one, Yuan Huangtou, son of the previous president, managed to survive one of those attempts (although he was later executed). If the story is true, it was the first attempt to conquer the air in person.
Now, one thing was to fly by force and another to do it on one's own initiative, as part of an investigation, and there we have to go a little further in history to the Middle Ages and look much closer, geographically speaking. Specifically to the Emirate of Córdoba, in Al Ándalus of the 9th century AD, where the extraordinary figure of Abu l-Qāsim Abbās ibn Firnās appears; better known by his simplified name of Abbas Ibn Firnás, he was the one who evoked Icarus in all his extension, from the way he tried to fly to his final result (although he was luckier than him as we will see).
Ibn Firnás was born in Izn-Rand Onda (the current Spanish town of Ronda, province of Málaga) between 809 and 810 AD, a descendant of one of the Berber families that had probably arrived in the Iberian Peninsula the previous century taking advantage of the collapse of the Visigoth kingdom; in fact, the etymology of his surname is Afernas, quite common in Algeria today. As was usual for scholars of his time, he mastered several disciplines, from astronomy to medicine, passing through chemistry, alchemy or astrology (these two considered sciences at the time); he also highlighted others that he should know every man of culture of the time, such as philosophy, music and poetry.
The other facet of his knowledge that interests us here is engineering, which allowed him to make some curious inventions: al-Maqata-Maqata (an anaphoric clepsydra that gave the day and night hours), a system for carving quartz (which avoided having to send it to Egypt, where it was usually carved), a complex armillary sphere, what he called reading stones (corrective lenses), a colorless glass manufacturing method (applied in ovens in Cordoba), a planetarium with visual and sound effects that was in his own home... He also deciphered the Arabic metric treatise compiled by the philologist Jalil ibn Ahmad.
He was also the one who introduced in the Iberian Peninsula the Zīj al-Sindhind or Great astronomical tables of the Sindhind , an astronomical manual written in Sanskrit because it came from India and was imported around 770 AD. by the Caliph of Baghdad Al-Mansur, who ordered its translation into Arabic from the famous translator Muhammad al-Fazari. With this work, the movements of all the celestial bodies known at the time (sun, moon, planets) could be calculated, in addition to providing abundant information to establish the calendar, so its arrival in Europe would have great importance for Western scientists. later.
This multifaceted activity made Ibn Firnás a true precursor of Leonardo da Vinci (he was nicknamed Hakim Al Andalus , the Wise Man of Al Andalus) and opened the doors of the court of Abderramán II, where he taught poetry to the rhythm of the lute. At that time, the Emirate of Córdoba was a cultural and technological reference by replacing parchment with paper, bringing new crops (rice, sugar, lemon, watermelon...), documenting the use of the magnetic needle for the first time and employing a new system of numbering that displaced the Roman and is the one that is used now. In this context, the warning issued by the Sevillian alfaquí Ibn Abdun would be framed:
That is why it is not surprising that one of the airports in the capital of Iraq has been baptized with the name of Abbas Ibn Firnás, as well as a crater on the Moon, one of the bridges that cross the Guadalquivir river as it passes through Córdoba and the Astronomical and Meteorological Center of Ronda. Likewise, his effigy appears on stamp issues in various countries (including Spain). Furthermore, the Christian world showed his admiration for his wisdom by Latinizing his spelling as Armen Firman.
Today there are those who think that they were two different people and that Firman was the inspiration for Ibn Firnás in his childhood for the idea of flying, having carried out a flight test that he would later imitate Andalusian. The dates, however, do not match; It would have happened in 852 AD. and by then Ibn Firnas was not only not a child but he was over forty years old, so he would be considered quite old. On the other hand, the main source on his life is the 17th-century Algerian historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari, who does not mention Firman even though he claims to have consulted "many of the early sources already lost" .
Says al-Maqqari:
In other words, Ibn Firnás made wooden wings that he covered with a silk cloth, adding feathers of birds of prey (a kind of hang glider that must have looked similar to those that Leonardo would draw centuries later). He then climbed to the top of the missing Arruzafa palace (presumably located on a slope of Mount Jabal al-Arusy, near where Medina Azahara would later be built) and before a large crowd invited by him for that purpose, he jumped into the abyss, managing to stay in the air long enough to have gone down in history.
Quite a success if it is true that he flew for ten minutes, as is usually read. He, however, was not very satisfied because at the moment of landing the maneuver was more violent than expected and, apart from that back pain, he broke both legs. As the text says, he later understood that he must have incorporated a bird-like tail to his device to have lift and reduce speed.
Perhaps he did not do so because his previous experiment weighed on him, the one he experienced in 852, at the age of forty-two, and which is the one he allegedly contemplated doing to Armen Firman, although we have already seen that Firman was surely himself:he jumped from a minaret of the Cordovan mosque using a large canvas nailed to a wooden frame as a parachute. He suffered some bruises when falling but without major, with what can be considered the first documented successful skydiving experience in history.
The next flight was in 875, when he was already sixty-two years old. He lived twelve more, thus dying at a very old age; It was in 887, in Córdoba. Other inventors would follow in his footsteps, the first being, according to some authors, the English Benedictine Elmer de Malmesbury, who in the first decade of the second millennium would have managed to cover some two hundred meters with a device similar to that of the Andalusian. Another British monk, Roger Bacon, took up Archimedean studies on the relationship between solids and fluids to theorize about a machine that could sustain itself in the air as ships do in water.
The cruel verse dedicated to Ibn Firnás by a minor Cordovan rhapsode who knew him personally, Mu'min ibn Said, does not reflect the importance of that adventure, whose memory has lasted until today; Ibn Said was his enemy at court and that is why the tone is mocking. Paradoxically, it contributed to immortalizing him because it constitutes the only preserved source on Ibn Firnás' flight, apart from the one cited above.