lightweight multi bay truss wings
Stringfellow's working model steam
triplane shown and flown at Crystal Palace in 1868 had parallel chord 2 bay strutted and wire cross- braced wings. ( It was sketched by Octave Chanute incidentally.) This was the same decade in which Matthew Piers Watt Boulton another English contemporary of Stringfellow patented the Aileron.
control of roll, pitch and yaw.
Boulton's flight control device, first described in his short 1864 pamphlet "On Aerial Locomotion", was publicly praised by the pioneering U.S. aeronautical engineer Charles Manly. While addressing the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1916, Manly referred directly to Boulton's invention, telling his audience
"...the system of lateral balancing or control now so universally used; [is] that of supplementary planes, now called ailerons. The description he gave of these in his British patent was thorough and clear. It is the first record we have of appreciation of the necessity for active lateral control as distinguished from the passive lateral equilibrium secured by having wings set at a dihedral angle.
With this invention of Boulton's we have the birth of the present-day three torque method of airborne control. The only thing then lacking [in 1868] to enable man to learn to operate flying machines was the one great organ – a suitable engine."
stuff me they even had the first aviation fatality.
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (30 March 1754 – 15 June 1785) was a French chemistry and physics teacher, and one of the first pioneers of aviation. He and the Marquis d'Arlandes made the first manned free balloon flight on 21 November 1783, in a Montgolfier balloon. He later died when his balloon crashed near Wimereux in the Pas-de-Calais during an attempt to fly across the English Channel. He and his companion, Pierre Romain, became the first known fatalities in an air crash.