The story of the Wright Brothers and their 1903 “discovery” of powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, is one of the enduring historical moments of Western society. But in The Man Who Discovered Flight, Toronto author and scientist Richard Dee suggests that we may have been a little too quick in giving Orville and Wilbur all the credit.

Dee’s project is to make sure modern readers understand the role of Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) in allowing humans to take to the air. At the same time, Dee undertakes to explain how Cayley’s contribution has come to be overlooked.

Cayley carved a detailed design for a primitive airplane and the earliest recorded description of the forces affecting flight on a small silver disc in 1799. Some 50 years later, he put somebody (most accounts say it was a young coachman, but Dee contends that’s probably just one of aviation’s many myths) into one of his contraptions, which actually took off and flew.

Dee paints a portrait of Cayley that’s equal parts country gentleman, family man, notebook doodler, always-curious inventor (he created, among other things, an effective artificial hand), and, above all, tireless proponent of machines that would allow people to fly by flapping, pedalling, gliding, and other means. By putting Cayley into a continuum of scientists and eccentrics that includes Chinese kite-makers, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Montgolfier brothers, Dee paints an enormously entertaining picture.

Perhaps the only criticism that can be levelled at The Man Who Discovered Flight is that Dee spends a great deal of his book on events that only tangentially relate to Cayley’s work as an aviation pioneer. But Dee, who knows his way around complicated scientific ideas, does so in such an entertaining manner that all of this scene-setting comes across as gift-wrapping for the ultimate present: getting to find out how – and why – Sir George Cayley deserves to be considered a true pioneer of flight.