Andrew Blain Baird  Andrew Blain Baird (1 January 1862 – 9 September 1951) was a Scottish blacksmith and aviation pioneer. Andrew Blain Baird was born in 1862 in Sandhead on Luce Bay in the Rhinns of Galloway, Scotland. One of three sons, his father was a fisherman and handloom weaver. He became an apprentice to a blacksmith in Sandhead, worked as a lighthouse keeper on Lismore, then as an ironworker at Smith and McLean's on the Clyde shipyards before finally setting up on his own as a blacksmith at 113 High Street in Rothesay, Isle of Bute, when he was 25. In 1892 at the age of 30 Andrew married Euphemia Martin at Glecknabae Farm on Bute. Baird was a daring thinker, a pioneer and innovator. He created many improvements to the plough, built a unique model of the triple expansion engine powered by electricity and was one of the original members of the Scottish Aeronautical Society. Eager to expand his knowledge of aviation, Baird corresponded with the early aviators Louis Bleriot and S. F. Cody and exchanged information about construction of aircraft and their flight. Inspired by a visit to Blackpool for England's first ever Aviation Week in October 1909, he returned to Rothesay ready to design and build his own sophisticated monoplane similar to Bleriot's but with an engine built by the Alexander Brothers in Edinburgh that was 4-cylinder, air-cooled and with water-cooled valves. The control system he would design for his aircraft would be unlike anything that had been developed at the time. His wife sewed brown trussore silk for the wings. The Baird monoplane, once completed in his own shop in the summer of 1910, went on show at an exhibition in the Esplanade Flower Garden at the front of Bute. and then to the amazement and excitement of all it was moved to the Bute Highland Games on 20 August 1910. From there it was taken for storage and readying directly to a barn owned by Willie Dickie at his farm at Cranlasgvourity, Bute. Scottish aviation history was about to be made when in the very early morning of 17 September 1910, the Baird Monoplane was taken by a Mr Scott on his horse-drawn wagon to Ettrick Bay – with its wide expanse of sand reminiscent of the Kitty Hawk N.C. site chosen by the Wright Brothers for their historic flight.