Career
Stringfellow worked in Chard, Somerset, England as a maker of bobbins and carriages for the lace industry. Together with Henson, he had ambitions of creating an international company, the Aerial Transit Company, with designs showing aeroplane travel in exotic locations like Egypt and China. Despite their efforts, the designs were flawed with Stringfellow"s ideas centred on monoplane and triplane models and Henson"s ideas centred on an underpowered steam-powered vehicle.
Employing two contra-rotating propellers on the first attempt, made indoors, the machine flew ten feet before the machine destabilised, damaging the craft.
The studio in Chard, and his home in Crewkerne is where some of his flying machines were photographed. A bronze model of that first primitive aircraft stands in Fore Street in Chard.
The town"s museum has a unique exhibition of flight before the advent of the internal combustion engine and before the manned powered flight made famous by the Wright Brothers. Stringfellow also invented and patented compact electric batteries, which were used in early medical treatment.
Stringfellow"s work was featured in an exhibition in 1868 at The Crystal Palace in London.
The character Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger), a German airplane designer, explains that it was a model airplane that made the first powered flight in 1848 and that though his own experience with airplane design is with building models, the principles are the same. His design for an airplane to be built from the scraps of their crashed plane will fly them out of the desert to safety.