The first person to make a real attempt at flying was Abbas ibn Firmas, a Cordoban Muslim engineer dating back to a thousand years before the Wright brothers. In 875 CE, at the age of seventy, he perfected a machine of silk and eagles’ feathers and jumped off a mountain, staying aloft for ten minutes before crashing. His conclusion was that the crash had happened because the device did not have a tail. He therefore pioneered the theory on the structure of omnithopter which is a vital component for aircraft stability during landing. In 1633 CE, Lagari Hasan Celebi in Istanbul built a rocket made for a human passenger. He tested his rocket, powered by over 300 pounds of gunpowder, at the shore of the Bosphorus near the Topkapi Palace. The rocket soared up about 300 meters into the air and when it ran out of fuel, Lagari opened a pair of wings he had fashioned for himself and gently managed to glide down to the Bosporus, and then swam to the shore.