Like many of the late-Victorian pioneers, Leonardo believed that it was the flapping motion of a bird's wings that enabled it to cruise through the air. Nonetheless, he designed a machine that looked very close to a modern hang-glider, with even the pilot's position drawn in a way that looks familiar to us today.

Balloons and gliders

Leonardo's notions never got beyond the drawing-board stage. The first people actually to propel someone through the air were the Montgolfier brothers of France. In October 1783, they sent the first-ever manned hot-air balloon flight on a five-mile journey over Paris. The crew were an infantry officer and appropriately enough a science teacher. Prior to an earlier test involving farm animals, nobody had quite been sure whether living things would be able to sail through the sky and survive.

The great 19th-century innovator was a German, Otto Lilienthal. He perfected several designs for gliders, staging demonstrations of wind-assisted flight on a specially built slope near Berlin. His machines were worn on the body like gigantic pairs of wings, and however eccentric they may appear now, seriously influenced the work of the Wright brothers. Lilienthal was an exemplary scientist. He made the ultimate sacrifice, dying in 1896 in the course of one of his experiments when a glider stalled and crashed to earth.

See Lilienthal's invention at the Science Museum.

The ornithopter

Gliding was one thing, but the dream remained to find a form of flight based on mechanical propulsion. Much as Leonardo da Vinci had done, early pioneers were convinced from the observation of birds that having a pair of flapping wings was essential. Devices built along these lines became known as 'ornithopters'.

Edward Purkis Frost, a Cambridgeshire magistrate, was a big name in ornithopters. His machines involved a colossal pair of silk and feather wings mounted on a wooden frame, which when suspended from a strong tree branch could be made to rise a little with each beat of the huge wings. The entire contraption, though, was much too heavy to become airborne under its own power.

Frost made his last ornithopter in 1904, just a few months after the seminal event in the history of aviation had taken place on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Wright brothers

On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, on the coast of North Carolina in the United States, Wilbur and Orville Wright made a series of demonstrations of what was to be the first manned powered flight in history. Orville was the pilot. The machine was called simply a "Flyer". Not only did the machine glide through the air, it could also bank and turn, and the flight itself was capable of being sustained independently of air currents.

Five years later, the Wright brothers demonstrated their Flyer in France, and later that same year, the first powered flight in Britain took place.

Samuel Cody was an American gold prospector and cowboy turned entrepreneur, who had come to Britain to establish a Wild West show, The Klondyke Nugget. In an era when there was an almost insatiable hunger for novelties and curiosities, freak shows and circuses, Cody's shows were a hit. His famous box kites were strong enough to carry a passenger suspended from their ropes. It was dangling from one of these in 1902 that his wife, Leila Marie, became the first female ever to fly. See her taking to the skies on the Science Museum website.

Inspired by the Wright brothers, Cody produced flying machines for the UK armed forces, taking to the air in October 1908 in a plane officially known as the British Army Aeroplane No 1. He was the ancestor of all RAF fighter pilots.

Blériot and beyond

Another milestone was passed with the first cross-Channel flight, made by Louis Blériot on July 25, 1909.

As he set off from Calais, it wasn't at all clear that Blériot would make it: his plane was fairly primitive, the engine only had three cylinders instead of the preferred six, and the cooling system was simple air-flow rather than water. But the Frenchman survived the flight and, by the time he landed at Dover, had become an international hero.

Probably no solo pilot until Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space achieved quite the degree of fanatical acclaim that Blériot did. His craft was put on display at Selfridges department store in London, where an estimated 12,000 people queued to see it.

Transatlantic flights

After Blériot, the records started tumbling. The first non-stop flight across the Atlantic was made in 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, who took 16 hours to get from the Newfoundland coast of Canada to Ireland.

They nearly didn't make it. At one point, the plane nearly pitched into the sea when low visibility caused Alcock to mishandle the controls.

When they did arrive in Europe, they drifted gracefully down towards what they thought was a useful field, only to half-wreck their craft as they subsided into an Irish bog.

Who killed Amy Johnson?

In May 1930, Amy Johnson, an aviator from Hull, became the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth, a distance of 10,000 miles. Commenting on her remarkable feat afterwards, the 26-year-old said: "The prospect did not frighten me, because I was so appallingly ignorant that I never realised in the least what I had taken on."

Johnson's tragic death was long considered an official mystery. While on a wartime delivery mission in January 1941, her plane came down in winter weather over the Thames estuary. Johnson ejected and, although a nearby ship attempted to rescue her from the water, she was dragged under it and killed. Her body was never recovered.

She had possibly been attacked after being misidentified as an enemy plane, but at a time when national morale was all-important, the truth did not readily come out. Who, after all, would own up to having shot down Amy Johnson?

See Amy on the Science Museum website.

Progress accelerates

In 1931, a new world air speed record of 407.5mph was set in the Supermarine S6-B, a plane designed by Reginald Mitchell, and which was to be one of the forerunners of the Spitfire. It was less than 30 years since the Wright brothers debut flight.