Abbas Ibn Firnas

Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbbās ibn Firnās ibn Wardās al-Tākurunnī (; c. 809/810 – 887 CE), known as ʿAbbās ibn Firnās was an Andalusi polymath: an inventor, astronomer, physician, chemist, engineer, musician, and poet.

Ibn Firnas made various contributions in the field of astronomy and engineering. He constructed a device which indicated the motion of the planets and stars in the Universe. In addition, Ibn Firnas came up with a procedure to manufacture colourless glass and made magnifying lenses for reading, which were known as reading stones. and, was an Umayyad (client) of Berber descent. His lineage may have been linked to the early Muslim conquests of the Iberian Peninsula. Later accounts emphasizing Arabic contributions to science may identify Abbas ibn Firnas in the broader frame of Islamic cultural heritage or as a muladí.

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 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: quote|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.

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. Al-Maqqari's account of Ibn Firnas – the sole primary source of the flight story

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.