The Prime Minister was firm on Wednesday evening, at the inaugural Bradfield Oration. The second Sydney airport at Badgerys Creek should be named, he declared, after John Bradfield, the visionary and genius Sydney engineer responsible for so much of the city's infrastructure including the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

"No other engineer has made such a mark on our city, on our state and on our country as John Bradfield," Mr Abbott enthused, going on to say he can "think of no better candidate", than this Queenslander to name the airport after.

Well, I reckon I can, Prime Minister. 

I believe – just as our mutual friend,Treasurer Joe Hockey, has long been advocating – the airport should be named after the Sydneysider who made the key scientific breakthrough that made manned flight possible in the first place. Yes, a Sydneysider who made more than a a mark on this city, but on the whole world of flight!

Who is that, many readers will ask?

Exactly.

The relative anonymity of Lawrence Hargrave is staggering, despite his seminal achievements. I only really grasped his significance a few years ago myself when writing a biography of Charles Kingsford Smith, which began with the beginnings of aviation itself.

See, back in 1894, when scientists and engineers around the world were trying to solve the riddle of flight, the most respected one of the lot, Octave Chanute – a retired engineer in Chicago, who acted as a kind of clearing house for all the others to share information through – wrote singularly prescient words in his book, Progress In Flying Machines:

"If there be one man, more than another, he who deserves to succeed in flying through the air," he wrote, "that man is Lawrence Hargrave of Sydney, New South Wales ...  M. Hargrave takes out no patents for any of his aerial inventions, and he publishes from time to time full accounts of them, in order that a mutual interchange of ideas may take place with other inventors working in the same field, so as to expedite joint progress, and ... ."

And funny he should say that. For later that same year, on November 12, 1894, here is Hargrave himself, on the southern end of Stanwell Park Beach with a couple of his assistants. Both here and in his natural stamping ground of Rushcutters Bay, he is regarded as a bit of a "maddie" for his obsessive belief that it is possible to build a machine that will fly, for always muttering about "curved wings" and "air flows" and "thrust" and so forth. But he remains obsessed with the idea that if air can flow fast enough over a curved surface, there will enough upwards thrust to lift a man in the air!

All of which is why he has constructed all these curious three−dimensional "box kites" − like two open−ended boxes, with curved tops, joined by thin struts – that on this day are all around him.

First he gets one in the air and then attaches the rope beneath it to the next kite, which goes up. And then he and his assistants do the same thing twice more, until four of these contraptions are in the air, all connected to one rope tethered to a kind of sling, which he sits in.

And now it happens. From the south-east comes a strong burst of wind which gives a silky surge and, as it flows over the winged kites.  The upward pressure on the rope attached to Hargrave increases to the point that ... hey, ho, and up he rises! – as suddenly the 44−year−old breaks free of the "surly bonds of earth" and is lifted far off the ground. It is possible! Before his awed assistants, Hargrave is momentarily lifted 16 feet (5 metres) above the earth and would go higher still if not for another rope that keeps him tethered to mother earth.

He returns to that earth a hero to the growing international aviation community, which – via Chanute – devours his published account, including the specifications for his kites, and continues its own research and development from there. The Wright brothers, who have also been in close touch with Chanute, would take off at Kitty Hawk less than a decade later, using exactly those kind of curved wings.

Among his many admirers was the famed American inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who would later visit Australia, just to meet Hargrave, and noted, amazed, that "Mr Lawrence Hargrave is better known in America than in his own country."

Surely, 120 years on, it is time to put that to rights. What better name to give a second Sydney airport, than after the Sydney man who made the breakthrough that started the whole shebang in the first place?

Peter FitzSimons is the Patron of Hargrave's Kite Day, held by schoolchildren every two years. The next one is this Wednesday at Stanwell Park.