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On October 16, 1908, the peace of Farnborough Common in Hampshire was broken by a four-cylinder engine stuttering into life. Before a small audience of farmers, soldiers and reporters, the engine powered an ungainly construction of bamboo, canvas and piano wire
along the bumpy heath and up into the morning air. 

The flight of British Army Aeroplane No 1 was brief. Just 27 seconds after leaving the ground, having covered a mere 1,390ft, the plane clipped trees and crashed to earth. Yet it marked Britain's inaugural powered flight. 

The flight established the legend of the aeroplane's charismatic and controversial pilot, the American cowboy, "Colonel" Samuel Franklin Cody. Since arriving in England in the 1890s, Cody had become a popular hero, first as a vaudeville entertainer then as a pioneer aviator
and inventor. Yet his life was shrouded in myth and rumour. 

When he died in an air crash in 1913 he took his secrets to the grave. But over the past decade, War Office records and court files as well as private diaries and letters have seeped into the public domain. The material reveals a life more dramatic than even his admirers imagined. 

Cody's public popularity contrasted starkly with the suspicion in which he was held by the military establishment. Court papers show some of their doubts were well placed. Cody's first great invention was himself.

His claim to have been the son of a Texan Confederate Army officer, born in 1861, was as false as his marriage to a well-heeled Englishwoman, Lela Blackburne Davis. His real name was Franklin Cowdery, and he had been born to a waggoner in 1867. 

Cody changed his name during his days as a Wild West show performer, when he had modelled himself as the son of W. F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody. The deception ended when he arrived in London in 1891. Court papers reveal Buffalo Bill's English agent saw a poster and promptly took out an injunction. Cody had been separated from a woman he married while touring with a Wild West show in America, and Blackburne Davis was married to a Chelsea publican with whom she had five children. 

The strange scandals of his private life are matched by the story that has emerged of his struggle to become the first man to fly in Britain. 

Cody had come to the military's attention in 1903 when he had demonstrated his pioneering man-carrying kite, capable of raising a passenger to 1,000ft. It proved so useful for reconnaissance he was employed at the Aldershot Balloon Factory in 1905. 

Such was the animosity of some senior generals towards him, however, it took him seven years to get paid for the kite. But by 1908, with France, America and Germany racing ahead in aviation technology, the Army had little option but to ask Cody to build its prototype aeroplane. 

Even then Cody was not allowed a fair try. Army files suggest his superior, Colonel John Capper, was determined that the Englishman, John William Dunne, should fly first. While Cody had to test his aircraft in the glare of the press at Farnborough, Dunne and his
prototype flyer were secretly locked away at a Scottish estate. 

Cody effectively disobeyed orders when he took to the skies. Six months later, in April, 1909, he received his reward - the sack. The Government soon performed a U-turn on its claims that aeroplanes had no future, but Cody remained an outsider as the new Royal Flying
Corps took shape. 

Cody was not beaten. As aviation gripped Britain's imagination, he became the original magnificent man in his flying machine. His exploits in the early air races in his giant plane, nicknamed The Flying Cathedral, made him every schoolboy's hero. 

His finest hour came in 1912, when he entered a version of his original Army plane for the War Office's first military trials. 

In the face of opposition from Europe's biggest aeroplane builders, Cody won the two first prizes. The War Office had to buy a plane remarkably similar to the one he had first built them, for the first prize of £5,000. 

But his final triumph came only posthumously. In August 1913, Cody's new seaplane broke up 500ft above Farnborough, sending him and his passenger to their deaths. George V shared the nation's sense of shock and was instrumental in granting Cody a full military funeral at Aldershot. 

A crowd of 100,000 people travelled to bid farewell to the first civilian - and the only Wild West cowboy - to be buried with the great heroes of Britain's military past.