The Wright Brothers Stood on Cayley's Shoulders

Sir Isaac Newton famously expressed that in order to make his numerous contributions to science, he stood on the shoulders of giants.  This seems to be a modest claim given the huge individual leaps of intellect he made.  A book that I recently read, "The Man who Discovered Flight: George Cayley and the First Airplane," by Richard Dee, had me thinking about the notion of how we are always continuing the work of our predecessors.

When any of us think about the first airplane, we invariably think of the Wright Brothers and their historic achievement; few have ever even heard of George Cayley.  Cayley's contributions to aviation were numerous, but they preceded the Wright Brothers' flight by about a century.  Consider this excerpt from Dee's book:

"Within the course of six scribbled pages in his notebook, Cayley had shown that man-made flight by wing was a theoretical possibility, but practically, with engineering constraints as they were at the time, it was a non-starter.  So having discovered that it could happen and then almost immediately proving that it couldn't happen yet, what next?"