Snowflake
A snowflake is a single ice crystal that has achieved a sufficient size, may have amalgamated with others falls through the Earth's atmosphere as snow. Each flake nucleates around a dust particle in supersaturated air masses by attracting supercooled cloud water droplets, which freeze and accrete in crystal form. Complex shapes emerge as the flake moves through differing temperature and humidity zones in the atmosphere, such that individual snowflakes differ in detail from one another, but may be categorized in eight broad classifications and at least 80 individual variants; the main constituent shapes for ice crystals, from which combinations may occur, are needle, column and rime. Snow appears white in color despite being made of clear ice; this is due to diffuse reflection of the whole spectrum of light by the small crystal facets of the snowflakes. Snowflakes nucleate around mineral or organic particles in moisture-saturated, subfreezing air masses, they grow by net accretion to the incipient crystals in hexagonal formations.
The cohesive forces are electrostatic. In warmer clouds, an aerosol particle or "ice nucleus" must be present in the droplet to act as a nucleus; the particles that make ice nuclei are rare compared to nuclei upon which liquid cloud droplets form. Clays, desert dust, biological particles may be effective, although to what extent is unclear. Artificial nuclei include particles of silver iodide and dry ice, these are used to stimulate precipitation in cloud seeding. Experiments show that "homogeneous" nucleation of cloud droplets only occurs at temperatures lower than −35 °C. Once a droplet has frozen, it grows in the supersaturated environment, one where air is saturated with respect to ice when the temperature is below the freezing point; the droplet grows by deposition of water molecules in the air onto the ice crystal surface where they are collected. Because water droplets are so much more numerous than the ice crystals due to their sheer abundance, the crystals are able to grow to hundreds of micrometers or millimeters in size at the expense of the water droplets.
This process is known as the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen process. The corresponding depletion of water vapor causes the droplets to evaporate, meaning that the ice crystals grow at the droplets' expense; these large crystals are an efficient source of precipitation, since they fall through the atmosphere due to their mass, may collide and stick together in clusters, or aggregates. These aggregates are the type of ice particle that falls to the ground. Guinness World Records lists the world's largest snowflakes as those of January 1887 at Fort Keogh, Montana. Although this report by a farmer is doubtful, aggregates of three or four inches width have been observed. Single crystals the size of a dime have been observed. Snowflakes encapsulated in rime form balls known as graupel. Although ice by itself is clear, snow appears white in color due to diffuse reflection of the whole spectrum of light by the scattering of light by the small crystal facets of the snowflakes of which it is comprised; the shape of the snowflake is determined broadly by the temperature and humidity at which it is formed.
At a temperature of around −2 °C, snowflakes can form in threefold symmetry — triangular snowflakes. The most common snow particles are visibly irregular, although near-perfect snowflakes may be more common in pictures because they are more visually appealing, it is unlikely that any two snowflakes are alike due to the estimated 1019 water molecules which make up a typical snowflake, which grow at different rates and in different patterns depending on the changing temperature and humidity within the atmosphere that the snowflake falls through on its way to the ground. Snowflakes that look identical, but may vary at the molecular level, have been grown under controlled conditions. Although snowflakes are never symmetrical, a non-aggregated snowflake grows so as to exhibit an approximation of six-fold radial symmetry; the symmetry gets started due to the hexagonal crystalline structure of ice. At that stage, the snowflake has the shape of a minute hexagon; the six "arms" of the snowflake, or dendrites grow independently from each of the corners of the hexagon, while either side of each arm grows independently.
The microenvironment in which the snowflake grows changes dynamically as the snowflake falls through the cloud and tiny changes in temperature and humidity affect the way in which water molecules attach to the snowflake. Since the micro-environment are nearly identical around the snowflake, each arm tends to grow in nearly the same way. However, being in the same micro-environment does not guarantee that each arm grow the same. Empirical studies suggest less than 0.1% of snowflakes exhibit the ideal six-fold symmetric shape. Twelve branched snowflakes are observed. Snowflakes form in a wide variety of intricate shapes, leading to the notion that "no two are alike". Although nearly-identical snowflakes have been made in laboratory, they are unlikely to be found in nature. Initial attempts to find identical snowflakes by photographing thousands of them with a microscope from 1885 onward by Wilson Alwyn Bentley found the wide variety of snowflakes we know about today. Ukichiro Nakaya developed a crystal morphology diagram, relating crystal shape to the temperature and moisture
Index (typography)
The symbol ☞ is a punctuation mark, called an index, manicule or fist. Other names for the symbol include printer's fist, bishop's fist, mutton-fist, hand director and pointing hand; the symbol originates in scribal tradition of the medieval and Renaissance period, appearing in the margin of manuscripts to mark corrections or notes. Manicules are first known to appear in the 12th century in handwritten manuscripts in Spain, became common in the 14th and 15th centuries in Italy with some elaborate with shading and artful cuffs; some were playful and elaborate, but others were as simple as "two squiggly strokes suggesting the barest sketch of a pointing hand" and thus quick to draw. After the popularization of the printing press starting in the 1450s, the handwritten version continued in handwritten form as a means to annotate printed documents. Early printers using a type representing the manicule included Mathias Huss and Johannes Schabeler in Lyons in their 1484 edition of Paulus Florentinus' Breviarum totius juris canonici.
In the modern period, the pointing hand became more popular in publications and directional signage. Some fingerposts have relief-printed or fully three-dimensional physical manifestations of pointing hands, The United States Postal Service has used a pointing hand as a graphical indicator for its "Return to Sender" stamp. In modern printing, it was used as a standard typographical symbol marking notes; the American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking treats it as the seventh in the standard sequence of footnote markers, following the paragraph sign. Sherman argues that as the symbols became standardized, they were no longer reflective of individuality in comparison to other writing, this explains their diminished popularity; the typical use of the pointing hand is as a bullet-like symbol to direct the reader’s attention to important text, having the same meaning as the word "attention" or "note". It is used this way both by printers. In the first few centuries of use, it can be seen used to draw attention to specific text, such as a title, inserted text, noteworthy passage, or sententiae.
In some cases, flower marks and asterisks were used for similar purposes. Less in earlier centuries the pointing hand acted as a section divider with a pilcrow as paragraph divider; some encyclopedias use it in articles to cross-reference, as in ☞ other articles. It sees use in magazines and comic books to indicate to the reader that a story on the right-hand page continues onto the next. In linguistics, the symbol is used in optimality theory tableaux to identify the optimal output in a candidate of generated possibilities from a given input. American science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut used the symbol as a form of margin on the first line of every paragraph in his novel Breakfast of Champions; the literary effect of this was to create separation between each paragraph, reinforcing the stream of consciousness style of the text. Thomas Pynchon parodies this punctuation mark in his novel Gravity's Rainbow by depicting a middle finger, rather than an index finger, pointing at a line of text. An upward pointing hand is used in the mouse cursor in graphical user interfaces to indicate an object that can be manipulated.
The first is believed to be the Xerox Star. Many web browsers use an upward pointing hand cursor to indicate a clickable hyperlink. CSS 2.0 allows the "cursor" property to be set to "hand" or "pointer" to intentionally change the mouse cursor to this symbol when hovering over an object. Many video games made in the 1980s and'90s text-based adventure games used these cursors. Unicode introduced six "pointing index" characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols block: U+261A ☚ BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX U+261B ☛ BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX U+261C ☜ WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX U+261D ☝ WHITE UP POINTING INDEX U+261E ☞ WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX U+261F ☟ WHITE DOWN POINTING INDEXUnicode 6.0 included several emoji pointing hands: U+1F446 WHITE UP POINTING BACKHAND INDEX U+1F447 WHITE DOWN POINTING BACKHAND INDEX U+1F448 WHITE LEFT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX U+1F449 WHITE RIGHT POINTING BACKHAND INDEXUnicode 7.0 incorporated more indices from the Wingdings fonts. V sign Charles Hasler, "A Show of Hands", Typographica O. S. 8, 4–11.
Prince and Paul Smolensky.: Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Blackwell Publishers. Technical Report, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science and Computer Science Department, University of Colorado at Boulder. Sherman, William. Toward a History of the Manicule, 2005. Collection of photographs of manicules on Flickr
Font
In metal typesetting, a font was a particular size and style of a typeface. Each font was a matched set of type, one piece for each glyph, a typeface consisting of a range of fonts that shared an overall design. In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, "font" is synonymous with "typeface"; each style is in a separate "font file"—for instance, the typeface "Bulmer" may include the fonts "Bulmer roman", "Bulmer italic", "Bulmer bold" and "Bulmer extended"—but the term "font" might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface. In both traditional typesetting and modern usage, the word "font" refers to the delivery mechanism of the typeface design. In traditional typesetting, the font would be made from wood. Today, the font is a digital file; the word font derives from Middle French fonte " melted. The term refers to the process of casting metal type at a type foundry. In a manual printing house the word "font" would refer to a complete set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page.
Upper- and lowercase letters get their names because of which case the metal type was located in for manual typesetting: the more distant upper case or the closer lower case. The same distinction is referred to with the terms majuscule and minuscule. Unlike a digital typeface, a metal font would not include a single definition of each character, but used characters would have more physical type-pieces included. A font when bought new would be sold as 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase "A"s, 34 lowercase "A"s; the rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. Some metal type characters required in typesetting, such as dashes and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, but were generic pieces which could be used with any font. Line spacing is still called "leading", because the strips used for line spacing were made of lead; the reason for this spacing strip being made from "lead" was because lead was a softer metal than the traditional forged metal type pieces and would compress more when "locked-up" in the printing "chase".
In the 1880s–1890s, "hot lead" typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece or in entire lines of type at one time. In addition to the character height, when using the mechanical sense of the term, there are several characteristics which may distinguish fonts, though they would depend on the script that the typeface supports. In European alphabetic scripts, i.e. Latin and Greek, the main such properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle and the character width; the regular or standard font is sometimes labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. The keyword for the default, regular case is omitted for variants and never repeated, otherwise it would be Bulmer regular italic, Bulmer bold regular and Bulmer regular regular. Roman can refer to the language coverage of a font, acting as a shorthand for "Western European". Different fonts of the same typeface may be used in the same work for various degrees of readability and emphasis, or in a specific design to make it be of more visual interest.
The weight of a particular font is the thickness of the character. A typeface may come from ultra-light to extra-bold or black. Many typefaces for office and non-professional use come with just a normal and a bold weight which are linked together. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers support faking a bolder font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset, or just smearing it at a diagonal angle; the base weight differs among typefaces. For example, fonts intended to be used in posters are quite bold by default while fonts for long runs of text are rather light. Therefore, weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font. Attempts to systematize a range of weights led to a numerical classification first used by Adrian Frutiger with the Univers typeface: 35 Extra Light, 45 Light, 55 Medium or Regular, 65 Bold, 75 Extra Bold, 85 Extra Bold, 95 Ultra Bold or Black. Deviants of these were the "6 series", e.g. 46 Light Italics etc. the "7 series", e.g. 57 Medium Condensed etc. and the "8 series", e.g. 68 Bold Condensed Italics.
From this brief numerical system it is easier to determine what a font's characteristics are, for instance "Helvetica 67" translates to "Helvetica Bold Condensed". The first algorithmic description of fonts was made by Donald Knuth in his Metafont description language and interpreter; the TrueType font format introduced a scale from 100 through 900, used in CSS and OpenType, where 400 is regular. There are many names used to describe the weight of a font in its name, differing among type foundries and designers, but their relative order is fixed, something like this: The terms normal, regular
Scissors
Scissors are hand-operated shearing tools. A pair of scissors consists of a pair of metal blades pivoted so that the sharpened edges slide against each other when the handles opposite to the pivot are closed. Scissors are used for cutting various thin materials, such as paper, metal foil, cloth and wire. A large variety of scissors and shears all exist for specialized purposes. Hair-cutting shears and kitchen shears are functionally equivalent to scissors, but the larger implements tend to be called shears. Hair-cutting shears have specific blade angles ideal for cutting hair. Using the incorrect scissors to cut hair will result in increased damage or split ends, or both, by breaking the hair. Kitchen shears known as kitchen scissors, are intended for cutting and trimming foods such as meats. Modern scissors are designed ergonomically with composite thermoplastic and rubber handles which enable the user to exert either a power grip or a precision grip; the noun scissors is treated as a plural noun, therefore takes a plural verb.
Alternatively, the tool is referred to by the singular phrase a pair of scissors. The word shears is used to describe similar instruments that are larger in size and for heavier cutting; the earliest known scissors appeared in Mesopotamia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. These were of the'spring scissor' type comprising two bronze blades connected at the handles by a thin, flexible strip of curved bronze which served to hold the blades in alignment, to allow them to be squeezed together, to pull them apart when released. Spring scissors continued to be used in Europe until the 16th century. However, pivoted scissors of bronze or iron, in which the blades were pivoted at a point between the tips and the handles, the direct ancestor of modern scissors, were invented by the Romans around 100 AD, they entered common use in not only ancient Rome, but China and Korea, the idea is still used in all modern scissors. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, spring scissors were made by heating a bar of iron or steel flattening and shaping its ends into blades on an anvil.
The center of the bar was heated, bent to form the spring cooled and reheated to make it flexible. The Hangzhou Zhang Xiaoquan Company in Hangzhou, has been manufacturing scissors since 1663. William Whiteley & Sons Ltd. was producing scissors by 1760, although it is believed the business began trading earlier. The first trade-mark, 332, was granted in 1791; the company is still manufacturing scissors today, is the oldest company in the West to do so. Pivoted scissors were not manufactured in large numbers until 1761, when Robert Hinchliffe of Sheffield produced the first pair of modern-day scissors made of hardened and polished cast steel, his major challenge was to form the bows. This process was laborious, Hinchliffe improved upon it in order to increase production. Hinchliffe lived in Cheney Square, set up a sign identifying himself as a "fine scissor manufacturer", he achieved strong sales in elsewhere. During the 19th century, scissors were hand-forged with elaborately decorated handles, they were made by hammering steel on indented surfaces known as'bosses' to form the blades.
The rings in the handles, known as bows, were made by punching a hole in the steel and enlarging it with the pointed end of an anvil. In 1649, in Swedish-ruled Finland, an ironworks was founded in the village of Fiskars between Helsinki and Turku. In 1830, a new owner started the first cutlery works in Finland, among other items, scissors with the Fiskars trademark. A pair of scissors consists of two pivoted blades. In lower-quality scissors, the cutting edges are not sharp. In high-quality scissors, the blades can be both sharp, tension sprung – to increase the cutting and shearing tension only at the exact point where the blades meet; the hand movement can add to this tension. An ideal example is in high-quality tailor's scissors or shears, which need to be able to cut delicate cloths such as chiffon and silk. Children's scissors are not sharp, the tips of the blades are blunted or'rounded' for safety. Mechanically, scissors are a first-class double-lever with the pivot acting as the fulcrum.
For cutting thick or heavy material, the mechanical advantage of a lever can be exploited by placing the material to be cut as close to the fulcrum as possible. For example, if the applied force is twice as far away from the fulcrum as the cutting location, the force at the cutting location is twice that of the applied force at the handles. Scissors cut material by applying at the cutting location a local shear stress which exceeds the material's shear strength; some scissors have an appendage, called a finger brace or finger tang, below the index finger hole for the middle finger to rest on to provide for better control and more power in precision cutting. A finger tang can be found on many quality scissors and on scissors for cutting hair. In hair cutting, some claim the ring finger is inserted where some place their index finger, the little finger rests on the finger tang. For people who do not have the use of their hands, there are specially designed foot-operated scissors; some quadriplegics can use a motorized mouth-operated style of
Bookbinding
Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book of codex format from an ordered stack of paper sheets that are folded together into sections or sometimes left as a stack of individual sheets. The stack is bound together along one edge by either sewing with thread through the folds or by a layer of flexible adhesive. Alternative methods of binding that are cheaper but less permanent include loose-leaf rings, individual screw posts or binding posts, twin loop spine coils, plastic spiral coils, plastic spine combs. For protection, the bound stack is either attached to stiff boards. An attractive cover is adhered to the boards, including identifying information and decoration. Book artists or specialists in book decoration can greatly enhance a book's content by creating book-like objects with artistic merit of exceptional quality. Before the computer age, the bookbinding trade involved two divisions. First, there was Stationery binding that deals with books intended for handwritten entries such as accounting ledgers, business journals, blank books, guest log books, along with other general office stationery such as note books, manifold books, day books, portfolios, etc.
Computers have now replaced the pen and paper based accounting that constituted most of the stationery binding industry. Second was Letterpress binding which deals with making books intended for reading, including library binding, fine binding, edition binding, publisher's bindings. A third division deals with the repair and conservation of old used bindings. Today, modern bookbinding is divided between hand binding by individual craftsmen working in a shop and commercial bindings mass-produced by high-speed machines in a factory. There is a broad grey area between the two divisions; the size and complexity of a bindery shop varies with job types, for example, from one-of-a-kind custom jobs, to repair/restoration work, to library rebinding, to preservation binding, to small edition binding, to extra binding, to large-run publisher's binding. There are cases where binding jobs are combined in one shop. For the largest numbers of copies, commercial binding is effected by production runs of ten thousand copies or more in a factory.
Bookbinding is a specialized trade that relies on basic operations of measuring and gluing. A finished book might need dozens of operations to complete, according to the specific style and materials. Bookbinding combines skills from other trades such as paper and fabric crafts, leather work, model making, graphic arts, it requires knowledge about numerous varieties of book structures along with all the internal and external details of assembly. A working knowledge of the materials involved is required. A book craftsman needs a minimum set of hand tools but with experience will find an extensive collection of secondary hand tools and items of heavy equipment that are valuable for greater speed and efficiency. Bookbinding is an artistic craft of great antiquity, at the same time, a mechanized industry; the division between craft and industry is not so wide. It is interesting to observe that the main problems faced by the mass-production bookbinder are the same as those that confronted the medieval craftsman or the modern hand binder.
The first problem is still. The craft of bookbinding originated in India, where religious sutras were copied on to palm leaves with a metal stylus; the leaf was dried and rubbed with ink, which would form a stain in the wound. The finished leaves were given numbers, two long twines were threaded through each end through wooden boards, making a palm-leaf book; when the book was closed, the excess twine would be wrapped around the boards to protect the manuscript leaves. Buddhist monks took the idea through Afghanistan to China in the first century BC. Similar techniques can be found in ancient Egypt where priestly texts were compiled on scrolls and books of papyrus. Another version of bookmaking can be seen through the ancient Mayan codex. Writers in the Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets, while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment; the modern English word book comes from the Proto-Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded.
The book was not needed in ancient times, as many early Greek texts—scrolls—were 30 pages long, which were customarily folded accordion-fashion to fit into the hand. Roman works were longer, running to hundreds of pages; the Greeks used to call their books tome, meaning "to cut". The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a massive 200 pages long and was used in funerary services for the deceased. Torah scrolls, editions of the Jewish holy book, were—and still are—also held in special holders when read. Scrolls can be rolled in one of two ways; the first method is to wrap the scroll around a single core, similar to a modern roll of paper towels. While simple to construct, a single core scroll has a major disadvantage: in order to read text at the end of the scroll, the entire scroll must be unwound; this is overcome in the second method, to wrap the scroll around two cores, as in a Torah. With a double scroll, the text can be accessed from both beginning and end, th
Fleuron (typography)
A fleuron ❧ is a typographic element, or glyph, used either as a punctuation mark or as an ornament for typographic compositions. Fleurons are stylized forms of leaves. Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style calls the forms "horticultural dingbats", it is known as a printers' flower, or more formally as an aldus leaf, hedera leaf, or hedera symbol. One of the oldest typographic ornaments, in early Greek and Latin texts, the hedera was used as an inline character to divide paragraphs to the pilcrow, it can be used to fill the white space that results from the indentation of the first line of a paragraph, on a line by itself to divide paragraphs in a stylized way, to divide lists, or for pure ornamentation. In more modern historic books, line breaks became more common as paragraph dividers, fleurons became popular to create ornamented borders. Fleurons were crafted the same way as other typographic elements were: as individual metal sorts that could be fit into the printer's compositions alongside letters and numbers.
This saved the printer effort in producing ornamentation. Because the sorts could be produced in multiples, printers could build up borders with repeating patterns of fleurons. In 1922, typographer Stanley Morison founded the Fleuron Society, which went on to publish the lavish typographical magazine The Fleuron. Designers continue to produce fleurons for use in digital typefaces. Hoefler Text, by Hoefler & Frere-Jones ITC Bodoni Ornaments, at Linotype and included with Mac OS X Fleurons Granjon, a Lanston font at P22 type foundry Monotype Goudy Sorts, at Linotype Printers Fleurons, by Gerald Giampa, a Lanston font at P22 type foundry Requiem, by Hoefler & Frere-Jones IM Fell Flowers, an open-source release of the Fell Types preserving the irregularities of the original 17th-century designs. Horta contains several ornaments with a science fiction motif In Unicode standards, the Symbols category includes fleurons referred to as "floral hearts" in the Dingbats and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks: U+2766 ❦ FLORAL HEART U+2767 ❧ ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET U+2619 ☙ REVERSED ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET Twenty-four fleurons found in the Wingdings and Wingdings 2 fonts have been included in Unicode 7.0 under its new Ornamental Dingbats block.
Book cover printed using fleuron designs
Airplane
An airplane or aeroplane is a powered, fixed-wing aircraft, propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine, propeller or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes and wing configurations; the broad spectrum of uses for airplanes includes recreation, transportation of goods and people and research. Worldwide, commercial aviation transports more than four billion passengers annually on airliners and transports more than 200 billion tonne-kilometres of cargo annually, less than 1% of the world's cargo movement. Most airplanes are flown by a pilot on board the aircraft, but some are designed to be remotely or computer-controlled; the Wright brothers invented and flew the first airplane in 1903, recognized as "the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight". They built on the works of George Cayley dating from 1799, when he set forth the concept of the modern airplane. Between 1867 and 1896, the German pioneer of human aviation Otto Lilienthal studied heavier-than-air flight.
Following its limited use in World War I, aircraft technology continued to develop. Airplanes had a presence in all the major battles of World War II; the first jet aircraft was the German Heinkel He 178 in 1939. The first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, was introduced in 1952; the Boeing 707, the first successful commercial jet, was in commercial service for more than 50 years, from 1958 to at least 2013. First attested in English in the late 19th century, the word airplane, like aeroplane, derives from the French aéroplane, which comes from the Greek ἀήρ, "air" and either Latin planus, "level", or Greek πλάνος, "wandering". "Aéroplane" referred just to the wing, as it is a plane moving through the air. In an example of synecdoche, the word for the wing came to refer to the entire aircraft. In the United States and Canada, the term "airplane" is used for powered fixed-wing aircraft. In the United Kingdom and most of the Commonwealth, the term "aeroplane" is applied to these aircraft. Many stories from antiquity involve flight, such as the Greek legend of Icarus and Daedalus, the Vimana in ancient Indian epics.
Around 400 BC in Greece, Archytas was reputed to have designed and built the first artificial, self-propelled flying device, a bird-shaped model propelled by a jet of what was steam, said to have flown some 200 m. This machine may have been suspended for its flight; some of the earliest recorded attempts with gliders were those by the 9th-century poet Abbas ibn Firnas and the 11th-century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury. Leonardo da Vinci researched the wing design of birds and designed a man-powered aircraft in his Codex on the Flight of Birds. In 1799, George Cayley set forth the concept of the modern airplane as a fixed-wing flying machine with separate systems for lift and control. Cayley was building and flying models of fixed-wing aircraft as early as 1803, he built a successful passenger-carrying glider in 1853. In 1856, Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris made the first powered flight, by having his glider "L'Albatros artificiel" pulled by a horse on a beach. Alexander F. Mozhaisky made some innovative designs.
In 1883, the American John J. Montgomery made a controlled flight in a glider. Other aviators who made similar flights at that time were Otto Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, Octave Chanute. Sir Hiram Maxim built a craft that weighed 3.5 tons, with a 110-foot wingspan, powered by two 360-horsepower steam engines driving two propellers. In 1894, his machine was tested with overhead rails to prevent it from rising; the test showed. The craft was uncontrollable, which Maxim, it is presumed, because he subsequently abandoned work on it. In the 1890s, Lawrence Hargrave conducted research on wing structures and developed a box kite that lifted the weight of a man, his box kite designs were adopted. Although he developed a type of rotary aircraft engine, he did not create and fly a powered fixed-wing aircraft. Between 1867 and 1896, the German pioneer of human aviation Otto Lilienthal developed heavier-than-air flight, he was the first person to make well-documented, successful gliding flights. Clement Ader constructed his first of three flying machines in the Éole.
It was a bat-like design run by a lightweight steam engine of his own invention, with four cylinders developing 20 horsepower, driving a four-blade propeller. The engine weighed no more than 4 kg/kW; the wings had a span of 14 m. All-up weight was 300 kg. On 9 October 1890, Ader attempted to fly the Éole. Aviation historians give credit to this effort as a powered take-off and uncontrolled hop of 50 m at a height of 20 cm. Ader's two subsequent machines were not documented to have achieved flight; the Wright brothers flights in 1903 are recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics, as "the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight". By 1905, the Wright Flyer III was capable of controllable, stable flight for substantial periods; the Wright brothers credited Otto Lilienthal as a major inspiration for their decision to pursue manned flight. In 1906, Alberto Santos-Dumont made what was claimed to be the first airplane flight unassisted by catapult and set the first world record recognized by the Aéro-Club de France by flying 220 meters in less than 22 seconds.
This flight was certified by the FAI. An ear
