Abbas ibn Firnas

Abu al-Qasim Abbas ibn Firnas (c. 810 to 887 CE) was an Andalusi polymath active in the Emirate of Cordoba, working as an inventor, astronomer, physician, chemist, engineer, musician and poet. He is remembered in transport history chiefly for an attempt at unpowered human flight, reported to have taken place near Cordoba, in which he constructed a wing like apparatus and launched himself from a height, an episode described in later Arabic sources as an early experiment in gliding rather than a controlled or sustained flight. Beyond this flight attempt, he built a mechanical device that modeled the motion of the planets and stars, developed a process for producing colourless glass, and created corrective lenses for reading, showing a broader engineering practice typical of the scientific culture of Cordoba in his era. His flight attempt is cited by later historians as one of the earliest recorded human efforts at heavier than air flight anywhere in the world, predating the better documented European glider experiments of the nineteenth century by roughly a thousand years.