When you get in a car, you had better be ready to buckle your seat belt!  3 point Seat Belt  save millions of lives every year, preventing both injuries and death. But the man who invented them died years before cars were invented...and before he could see his most amazing theories realized.

Seat belts are credited to Sir George Cayley, regarded as one of the most important inventors in history. Cayley was a wealthy landowner who, from an early age, was obsessed with the concept of aerodynamics. As a youth, he developed a three-bladed propeller that he attached to the tip of a toy top. When it spun, the top levitated a few inches off the ground! Cayley knew he was on to something. He didn't know it yet, but had produced an early version of what would become the helicopter.

Cayley devoted much of his research toward building a flying machine. At this point in time, most scientists believed the only way for a man to fly was through a machine that mimicked a bird's flapping wings. These machines were known as "ornithopters."

Cayley believed that there was a better way to build a flying machine, but was frustrated by his inability to find a source of propulsion strong enough to send and keep a machine in the air. This was back in the late 1700s and early 1800s, before machines ran on gas-powered engines. At several points in his career, Cayley went back to pursuing the ornithopter model, with no success.

In 1799, Cayley produced a metal disk with etchings that prefigured the modern-day airplane as we know it. On one side, Cayley depicted the four forces that govern flight (weight, lift, drag and thrust). On the other side, Cayley depicted his version of an aircraft that employed those forces. Cayley's aircraft featured a fixed main wing, a fuselage, a cruciform tail unit with surfaces for vertical and horizontal control, a cockpit for the pilot, and a rudimentary means of propulsion that consisted of revolving vanes, a precursor to the propeller. Later, he studied the structure of birds' wings to figure out how they stayed aloft. This led to the design of airfoils, the part of a plane's wing that produces lift.

So what does this have to do with seat belts? Easy - Cayley created a safety belt to hold his pilots fast when they were inside his gliders. In addition, the system of wheels on chains he created for his gliders helped bring about another invention - the bicycle wheel. If you ride a bike, drive in a car, or fly in an airplane, remember what you owe to George Cayley, known as "The Father of Flight."