Abbas ibn Firnas

Work

Abbas ibn Firnas devised a means of manufacturing colourless glass. He invented various glass planispheres, and he made corrective lenses ("reading stones"). Abbas bin Firnas also devised an apparatus consisting of a chain of objects that could be used to simulate the motions of the planets and stars, and he developed a process for cutting rock crystal that enabled Al-Andalus to cease exporting quartz to Egypt to be cut. He introduced the Sindhind to Al-Andalus, which had important influence on astronomy in Europe. He also designed the al-Maqata, a water clock, and a prototype for a kind of metronome.

Aviation

Some seven centuries after the death of Firnas, the Algerian historian Ahmad al-Maqqari (d. 1632) wrote a description of Ibn Firnas that included the following:

Among other very curious experiments which he made, one is his trying to fly. He covered himself with feathers for the purpose, attached a couple of wings to his body, and, getting on an eminence, flung himself down into the air, when according to the testimony of several trustworthy writers who witnessed the performance, he flew a considerable distance, as if he had been a bird, but, in alighting again on the place whence he had started, his back was very much hurt, for not knowing that birds when they alight come down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one.

Al-Maqqari is said to have used in his history works "many early sources no longer extant", but in the case of Ibn Firnas, he does not cite his sources for the details of the reputed flight, though he does claim that one verse in a ninth-century Arab poem is actually an allusion to Ibn Firnas's flight. The poem was written by court poet Mu'min ibn Saïd, under Muhammad I (emir of the Emirate of Córdoba, d. 886), who was acquainted with (and usually critical) of Ibn Firnas. The pertinent verse runs: "He flew faster than the phoenix in his flight when he dressed his body in the feathers of a vulture." No other surviving sources refer to the event.

It has been suggested that Ibn Firnas's attempt at glider flight might have inspired the attempt by Eilmer of Malmesbury between 1000 and 1010 in England; however, there exists no recorded evidence to support this hypothesis.

Armen Firman

According to limited secondary sources, approximately 20 years before Ibn Firnas attempted to fly he witnessed a man named 'Armen Firman' wrap himself in a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts and jump from a tower in Córdoba, intending to use the garment as wings on which he could glide. The alleged attempt at flight was unsuccessful, and the garment slowed his fall enough that he sustained only minor injuries.

However, secondary sources that deal exhaustively with Ibn Firnas's flight attempt make zero references to 'Armen Firman'. Al-Maqqari's account of Ibn Firnas – the sole primary source of the flight story – makes no mention of 'Firman'. Because 'Firman's' jump is said to have been Ibn Firnas's source of inspiration, the lack of any mention of 'Firman' in Al-Maqqari's account may point to synthesis — the tower jump later confused with Ibn Firnas's gliding attempt in secondary writings.

It is likely that 'Armen Firman' is, in fact, the Latinized name of Abbas ibn Firnas.

Legacy

In 1973, a statue of Ibn Firnas by the sculptor Badri al-Samarrai was installed at the Baghdad International Airport, in Iraq. In 1976, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved the naming of a crater on the moon after Ibn Firas: the lunar impact crater, Ibn Firnas. In Córdoba, the Abbas ibn Firnás Bridge was named in his honour (the bridge's construction was completed in 2011). Firnas Airways, a British one-plane airline, was also named after him.