Cayley Lane

There are two things called the Cayley Plane,

1. The projective plane over the octonions, named after the math­e­mat­ician Sir Arthur Cayley (1821–1895), and

2. 
   George Cayley’s Sketch of His “Boy-Carrier” (1849)
   The ground­breaking aero­plane designed by his distant cousin, the aviation pioneer Sir George Cayley (1774–1857).

I could write a lot about the first. In fact, I’ve written a paper about it,

The Cayley Plane and String Bordism, Geometry & Topology 18-4 (2014), 2045–2078.

But last week I travelled to Brompton [outside Scarborough, UK] to pay homage to the second.

I visited Sir George’s workshop at Brompton Hall, where he designed his plane. [Cayley Lane, pictured above, runs beside it.] And I spent the night at Sir George’s annex Wydale Hall, now a retreat centre run by the Diocese of York.

After breakfast a kind 83-year-old pastor named Michael walked me to Brompton Dale, where in 1853 Sir George’s terrified coachman John Appleby flew the plane [afterwards saying “Please, Sir George, I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, and not to fly.”]

There is, as far as I know, no connection with the Brompton folding bicycle – my primary mode of transport, named by its inventor Andrew Ritchie after the Brompton Oratory in London, where Alfred Hitchcock got hitched, and which Ritchie could see from his workshop window while building prototypes in 1976 – outside the fact that Sir George invented the wire wheel for his plane.

Speaking of London, a few days earlier I visited Lincoln’s Inn, where in the 1840’s Sir Arthur would meet to discuss invariant theory with his friend JJ Sylvester – not to be confused with Sylvester II.