IS IT A BIRD? IS IT A PLANE?......YES - AEROPLANE (1903)

While it isn’t exactly fair to rate an invention by how cool it is, you can’t help but notice that the aeroplane is regardless, really, really cool. Seriously, just look at them! Today’s airliners are the metal monsters of the sky, impossibly heavy machines magically suspended in mid air. It merely stands to reason that the aeroplane be considered as one of the most dazzling achievements of the human race. Of course like most great inventions, it didn’t simply pop up over night. The history of flight actually goes back over several millennia, but only really started cooking up progress when the ridiculously awesome Leonardo Da Vinci put his mind to it. Not content with painting some of the most famous artworks of history, Da Vinci was also a bit of a superstar when it came to designing weird and wonderful contraptions. Among these were some of the first mechanisms intended to take humans from the relative safety of land to the terrifying unpredictability of flight (you have to say that on the face of it, that’s a pretty ballsy concept). Unfortunately though, it would still be many centuries before the first powered flight and Leo’s plans never made it off the ground (HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA). For all the progress made in addressing the idea of flight, the first plane as we know it would take the collaborative efforts of many other distinguished innovators. Such a technical machine had so many dizzying factors to consider, that each would have to be worked out one by one before we could enjoy discount flights to Malaga. George Cayley provided some of the biggest leaps for the new technology in the first half of the 19th Century, making crucial observations about the way wings should be designed to make them aerodynamic. Crucially, he also pointed out the need for a power source of some kind, which would allow the individual in control to actually control the craft (rather than being left to the whims of Mother Nature). Such amendments were taken into great consideration by the famous Wright brothers, who absorbed the progress of Cayley and many others like him. The fruit of their labour was a historic 12 second flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. It’s hard to wrap your head around the implications of this moment, considering that for however brief a time, man was no longer a slave to gravity. Less than seventy years later, we’d see just how far this idea could be pushed.