John Stringfellow flew a small steam-powered fixed-wing model in 1848 after collaborating with Henson. The flight was unmanned, but it showed that powered heavier-than-air machines could leave the ground. Its significance lay in making the powered aeroplane an experimental object rather than a paper fantasy.

Stringfellow's model belongs to the workshop culture behind Victorian invention stories and popular science writing. It gave concrete form to the mechanical sublime that later poets would confront in railways, factories, telegraphs, and finally aircraft.