The First Flights....

The Lone Islands began seeing attempts at manned flight long before it was achieved, and even when it was, this was via lighter than air craft, the first unsuccesful hydrogen balloons that, despite meeting with disaster, did fly, and later the succesful and celebrated Rigid Airships, making use of the widely available and safer Atmos, (Helium).
It was long thought, as the eccentric attempted to begin gliding using fixed wing frames without the aid of gas, that Lighter than Air flight was the only way mankind would ever leave the ground. Higher power density of the propulsion was needed to make it work. Gliders had been made and piloted succesfully on skitterish trips down hills or, for the more bold hearted, off of cliffs.
Airships could simply be made with a large enough volume of lifting gas to pull any kind of steam engine off the ground, and in the beginning days, all that were available were heavy, awkward engines best suited to work in small watercraft, that worked at quite low pressures.

However, as the steam engine became better and better, and was refined not so much by the minds of practical science, but by eccentric engineers and bicycle-makers in their own untidy lofts, attempts at heavier than air flight continued to be made, all the while with increasing success. Cable steerage systems were thoroughly understood, being used all the time by the mid 800's in airships, as well as in the gliders that were successful. The need for ailerons, elevators and a rudder for full control of a fixed wing aircraft was understood as the best way to do it.
An ornithopter had been tried, but the linkages were so awkward, the motion so violent, and the stress on the hinged wings so high for the aspect ratio that was needed, the craft not only and most assuredly did not fly, but shook itself to pieces attempting to take off.
Following the increase in pressure of locomotive boilers in particular, and the discovery that copper was an excellent metal for handling high pressures, as well as a corrosion-resistant metal with great heat transfer properties, coupled with the growing knowledge of high-surface-area, low-volume boilers, several men all throughout the world began to tackle seperate problems with no coordination between them.
Mister Arnold Framis, in 856, devised a 300 PSI water tube boiler and steam engine for use in a fixed air frame. The airframe itself, a quadroplane, was designed by another of his friends, who was woefully inexperienced with the matters of aeronautics. The steam engine, built very lightly to save weight, was so flimsy that it tore itself apart under load on the first takeoff attempt. THe second takeoff attempt was performed with the same boiler and a strengthened engine with a better valvegear. This time, the airframe collapsed when the landing gear hit a pothole in the field.
Antwerp Gainge, in 858, tried a tandem-wing monoplane with a steam turbine direct-driving a large propeller. Although the boiler was adequate, the turbine failed to ever provide the torque needed for the propeller to ever get the airframe even rolling on its wheels. He spent the rest of his time perfecting steam bicycles instead.
Later that same year, another bicycle maker (Let it be noted that bicycle makers seemed to have developed an odd affinity for the fixed-wing airplane, perhaps because their wheels were the only thing acceptable to be used as landing-gear...) , Luigi Abielietti, in the nation of Milan, constructed a marvelous aircraft, concentrating soely on its engine and the power-to-weight ratio, and the ability of the airframe to provide enough lift for the engine, at the cost of all else. His aircraft, a monoplane with a gigantic one-hundred foot wingspan, was fitted with a complex system of two boilers, reheaters, superheaters and feedwater heaters, even a condenser, to direct-drive two propellers in a counter-rotating fashion.
There was no room in the fuselage for him to sit, so two flights were made tethered to the ground and several more were made manned, with Luigi clinging to the landing struts to work the engine. To the despair of many, including himself, he had concentrated so much on the engine, that he had payed no attention to the steering or the attitude control of the craft, aside a simple and woefully small rudder. Luckily, because of sensible design from observing other aircraft and aerodynamics, Luigi had built the craft as a high-wing with a low center of gravity and plenty of Dihedral, and it was very stable, however his trips proved unpredictable and at the mercy of the wind upon the specific day, and the land formations that greeted him.
The last flight of his aircraft resulted in a meeting with a tall cliff face. He met it, thanks again to the very high aspect ratio of his aircraft, as well as the boundary layer air of the cliffside, at only a walking pace, and as such the aircraft and its engine were not destroyed, but it and Luigi were both stranded for several hours. His attempts, for these reasons, were deemed valiant but unsuccesful.
In 860, Harold Mottken of Housan, while working in Lawrencia, devised a multi-wing aircraft with a large delta tail. His craft made use of a long and narrow flash-boiler, working at 400 PSI, and a triple-expansion marine engine, the weight of which was accounter for by the proposed high aspect ratio of six stacked sets of wings.
The craft did achieve a short and controlled flight, however its airframe was flimsy and depended on the delicate balance of calibration of several tension cables putting compression onto girders and strongbacks to remain structurally sound. On the shock of a hard landing, the airframe disintegrated. When this happened, a fitting on the flash boiler broke loose. Whereas the physical properties of a flash-boiler made it impossible for an explosion to occur, the immense steam pressure venting suddenly from the dry end was such to propel the entire boiler and it's shell, a nine-inch diameter, five-foot long apparatus, out of the airframe and across the field at several hundred miles per hour, coming to rest in the dining room of a house half a mile away.

In 861, a year that would be remembered, as soon as spring graced the islands, two notable attempts were made that would change the mechanized world. Fritz Peuhler devised a sensible and light monoplane, dual-airscrew craft, direct-driven by two steam engines and a boiler of uncanny lightness. Its shape made it stable, and its hull was made of such a shape, and so sound, that the craft turned out to be amphibious without the original intent of its builder to be so. Another feature that was noted was a clutch from the steam engines to the landing gear, so the craft might come up to speed very quickly on the ground to assist getting into the air, where friction of forward motion was less, for most aircraft had far more trouble getting into the air than staying in the air.
At the same time, another man, who had spent his life fiddling with gliders and achieving great success, named Gustav D'ameux, in Francais Lawrencia, built a Canard-Triplane, which he dubbed "Louisa III", after Louisa I and Louisa II, both successful gliders, and after his beloved wife, who had, in the time of his non-powered flights, come down with a terrible sickness, and who had, by the time of this venture, recovered fully, bolstering his resolve.
The airplane was called the most beautiful thing to have ever been constructed for the purpose of heavier-than-air flight.
The steam engine was a marvel, two center-stalk flash boilers with several banks of spirals each, in the mindset of redunancy, as either boiler by itself could feed the engine, which was a two-cylinder double expansion type with Jodrel valvegear. No energy was wasted, exhaust steam from the engines preheated water in it's first stage, before being consensed back into water in an atmospheric-bypass heat exchanger. Before entering the boiler, this already preheated water was heated again in an economiser exposed directly to the boiler fire. The working pressure was a tremendous gamble, and one that he was advised against, at 650 PSI. Both craft took to the skies in the Fifth month of the year of 861, but Fritz' monoplane made a flight only two weeks after Gustav's craft, for the sheer fact that he did not know of the Louisa III and worked have worked harder and faster if he had, and for the fact that he was a meticulous man.

Louisa III was brought out on a breezy spring afternoon, steamed up, given a final check-over, and with a rapidly growing crowd of people in attendance (People always flocked to Gustav's workshop whenever he would bring the white-clad craft out to be rolled around or adjusted), the propeller was set in motion and the craft easily began to roll, and hopped several times under a cautious hand, much to the delight of spectators.
What was to come in a few seconds, however, they did not expect at all. Gustav's caution was well planned, for the craft lifted off the ground much more eagerly than he had even dared hope for. The first hop was a startled reaction to close the throttle, which resulted in the craft settling. The next few were to get a feel for just how it left the ground and handled when doing so. After the sixth hop, and the hedgerow's approach at the end of the field, Gustav had satisfied himself. His wife, the namesake of the craft, help turn the airframe around.
Gustav let full steam into the engines, the craft left the ground and did not return. The frenzied crowd watched in awe as the craft ascended into the clear blue, made an easy turn, and headed directly for the next town, where almost all who watched frantically gave chase to.
Above the town Gustav circled and circled, drawing the attention of hundreds, as it was coincidentally, a market day. When he had grown tired of this, he began flying along side the trains arriving and departing from the local railway station, practicing matching his speed with them, drawing cheers from the passengers and raised eyebrows from the locomotive crews. He only had to land when the pressurized kerosene in his fuel tanks that supplied the boiler burners ran out, and he glided in easily on a wagonroad far away from the town, begrudging the fact of the long walk back, towing the airframe by hand.
On a grounded testrun of the monoplane three days before the flight of Louisa III, Fritz was thoroughly displeased with what he perceived to be an imbalance of the left side propeller, and a low volumetric efficiency of the boiler feedpump which had not been measured when the engine was running by itself on sawhorses.
Two weeks later, on a quiet morning, he wheeled his craft out of his workshop into the streets of the city of Franzburg, the Housanic Capital, before the gaslamps had even been extinquished.
Once the two passing trams had screeched out of his view, he, to the laughter of many nearby children, extended the radially folding armature-supported wings, spun the engines, and in no less than three hundred feet, was at speed and airborne. He circled the high buildings of the city in a daring flight for a half an hour, before his fuel supply ran dry. Having not planned on running out of fuel, and Instantly regretting the decision to make a flight over a city, Fritz headed for the river Enmar which bisected it, planning to somehow save his craft after he had made a landing by hailing a ship with a sizeable windlass. No such action was needed, for when he landed the craft, as softly as he could in the calm water, the fuselage proved water tight, and he simply needed to row to shore. As such, Gustav was credited with the first successful flight, and with the complaints of Fritz three years later, they were both given shared credit for the first fixed-wing flight of the world.