Here are the achievements of the Wrights with the 1903 Flyer:
1. First 3-axis flight controls
2. First propellor theory that was twice the efficiency of other airscrews
3. First aircraft engine that had twice the power/weight of other engines
4. First design that used a wind tunnel to get an efficient wing shape
5. First directed research and development program to identify the problems and solve them one by one, with the results culminating in the 1903 Flyer
6. Properly documented everything with photographs, notebooks and witnesses
7. The Flyer is hanging in a museum today, and exacting replicas have been built and flown exhibiting the same documented flight characteristics as the Flyer.
If you look at other contenders, they were all lacking these points. For example, with the Wright propellor, engine, and airfoil their craft had an enormous advantage over other designs that were trial and error.
All modern aircraft can trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, and no other claimant. The others were all developmental dead ends.
P.S. About the catapult thing - are airplanes launched from aircraft carriers not airplanes? Besides, the 1903 Flyer did not use a catapult.
I always argue that the Wright Bros are the USA's greatest engineer(s).¹ Planes today still use the same design (in fact, the Flyer is even better—a twisting wing is more efficient than ailerons, but we haven't figured out how to make titanium, aluminum & carbon fiber bendy like wood (yet)).
¹–my 2nd spot goes to John Moses Browning – also, whose 120+ year designs are not only still in use, they're still in production.
I'm inclined to agree. If their wiki is true, they were just doing it out of rather pure interest with no financial backers whatsoever until later on. In fact it made it sound like other countries basically quit funding some other claimants listed in this thread because of how bad they turned out and assumed the brothers were scammers making fake claims. Until they showed up one day and flew circles in the air.
That pure drive of doing something out of sheer interest and refusal to accept failure is really inspirational. I wish I had half the drive they did!
I would add in second place Skunkworks and the A12, which is the perfection of aviation technology in my opinion. It's just such an insane piece of technology, in every part you take a look at it gets more and more absurd of what's in that plane.
And if you build an airplane so absurdly advanced that 70+ years later people still think it was aliens that built it, you've set your mark in the history books.
Third place in my heart takes the Rutan Voyager [2] which essentially pushed its efficiency so hard that it coincidentally invented the design for modern delivery drones.
You can bend those materials at least once, the problem is bending them and still having the wings maintain their integrity through tens of thousands of flight hours.
The Flyer was a canard design which would be considered a non-standard configuration today. And I respect the Wrights a lot, but the last book I read on them said that if they hadn't invented their aircraft, someone else in the world would have done it within 10 years. The Wrights were in touch with other experimentalists around the world like Cayley, Lilienthal and drew from their work. Also the science of fluid mechanics was way further ahead of aeronautical engineering with guys like Prandtl at Caltech (though an airplane isn't just challenged fluids problems). So stuff like the airfoil and prop optimization probably would have followed from that as well.
A great list although the phrase cherry-picking comes to mind. Should we add 8. "Wright biplane used ground mounted launching rails, and assistance of a catapult".
1. The 1903 Flyer did not use a catapult. It did use a single rail, as taking off from sand is not very practical.
2. There's a lot of question about Pearse's first flight, as to its date and whether it happened at all - because Pearse left behind no photos, drawings, documentation, or the airplane.
3. Edison's claims are fully documented, witnessed, patented, and litigated.
Lilienthal's lift/drag numbers turned out to be off by a factor of 2, which is why the Wrights developed their wind tunnel and did exacting experiments to get the correct numbers, and developed the shape of their wing from it.
> 2. First propellor theory that was twice the efficiency of other airscrews
> 3. First aircraft engine that had twice the power/weight of other engines
The other points seem good but I’m a little skeptical of these—“the first 2x improvement” generally seems like a less impressive metric in the sense that when a field is early and thing are just getting started, large-multiplier improvements are pretty common, right? The first 2x improvement to engine power/weight in an airplane could just be the result of being the first ones to seriously look at the problem.
As a field matures, the multipliers might get much smaller as the low hanging fruit is picked out. The last 2x improvement might be more impressive actually.
The Wrights looked into marine screws, and were astonished to discover they were all designed by trial and error.
The Wrights made a breakthrough in realizing that a propellor was a rotating wing, and developed the first theory of propellors enabling them to build one that was 90% efficient. This is as opposed to the flat bladed screws used by other experimenters which were 50% efficient.
This means a near doubling of power for the same weight of engine and drive train.
The Wrights could not find an existing engine with the desired power/weight, and the engine makers refused to design/build one. Hence they hired a machinist to help design/build a custom engine, with double the power/weight ration of existing engines. The Wrights developed the very first practical aviation gas engine.
This was an enormous factor in creating a successful airplane.
P.S. Fun fact: Santos Dumont was a rather tiny man. In the movie "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" they created several flying replicas of early machines, including Dumont's "Demoiselle". But the Demoiselle wouldn't fly, it just ran around the field nailed to the ground. Finally, the engineers realized that Dumont was a tiny man, and located a tiny pilot, and then the Demoiselle flew delightfully. So, Dumont had his own peculiar advantage in power/weight.
"being the first ones to seriously look at the problem" is what makes the Wright Brothers so historically significant. They tackled flight as an engineering problem and put serious work into a lot of the important sub-problems. Their superior methodology is a big part of what led to their overall success and being first to achieve other less arbitrary milestones.
To be fair, #6 and I think #7 were true of Santos Dumont as well, and for years after 01903 (which did have witnesses, who were disbelieved, but AFAIK no public photos) the Wrights were very secretive. Santos Dumont himself favored crediting the Wrights, since he had achieved sustained flight but not controllable sustained flight.
While airplanes are catapulted from carriers due to the limited runway length available onboard, it's worth noting that they are fully capable of taking off from standard runways. On the other hand, a glider can only be launched using a catapult or by gliding off a cliff.
The Wright brothers did create a glider ( https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/1900-wright-gl... ). They also created a powered airplane a gasoline engine and propellers ( https://www.nps.gov/articles/wrightflyer.htm ). They also continued to develop their planes after that first flight. I'm amused by the number of people I've met who seem to think that they flew around a little, then stuck everything in the barn and went back to bicycle making.
None of this seems to be evidence that the Wrights were first. But I won’t be so cynical to suggest the list is the kind of things that make second systems second systems.
The Wrights are giants in the history of aviation for reasons like those you describe whether or not they were first.
From the perspective of their patents and the multi-year monopoly that they exploited with everything from aircraft sales to the military to flying schools being first is certainly critical.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been taught the Wrights were first all my life. But I live in the US.
The Wrights demonstrated what was needed to fly, and there's no evidence the pretenders had solved those problems.
For example, they had flat propellors without an airfoil. This means they needed nearly twice the power. Their engines would have been twice as heavy, too. They didn't have useful flight controls. Their wings looked smaller than the Flyer's.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The Wrights had every bit of evidence needed. None of the others did.
I would like to nominate this comment as one of the best ever posted on HN. In fact, I would love to see a whole documentary about each of these points.
Check out Gregs Airplanes and Automobiles for really well researched aeronautic docs. He made one specifically about the Wrights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpQAGQiv4Q
What's also interesting is the story after 1903. The big aircraft builder today isn't the Wright Company, it's Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Wright brothers got embroiled in patent lawsuits (in particular against Curtiss), instead of continuing their developments. They eventually won, but Wilbur died in 1912 (possibly related to all the traveling done as part of the patent fights).
Actually, initially they even fought to have people believe in their success. They weren't that great at public relations, and it took a while for people to believe they had a working airplane.
There was also a feud with the Smithsonian. Until the forties, the Smithsonian considered a competing aircraft to be the first airplane (also related to Curtiss). In 1948 the Wright estate sold the first plane to the Smithsonian for a dollar, but the agreement stipulated that
"Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the 1903 Wright Aeroplane, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."
I guess this partially explains why the Americans only know about the Wright brothers as the original inventors of the airplane, as opposed to various national heroes in other countries.
Oh an btw, talking about companies. The company the Wright brothers founded still exists - it's now Curtiss-Wright, I guess Wright eventually merged with their worst enemy (and a bunch of other companies).
Too bad the Wright brothers didn't continue their developments as successfully as they started, and struggled to make it big on top of their invention. At least they got the recognition eventually.
Btw, the Smithsonian has a cool exhibit on the Wright brothers, really encourages to you read up on them. [1]
This detail about the Smithsonian was news to me so I went reading up on it. Curtiss had been involved in supporting Samuel Langley as the key breakthrough in aircraft, and it happened that Langley had been director of the Smithsonian up until his death in 1906, so the museums had direct access to his papers and prototypes. The Smithsonian changing position and conceding to the Wright brothers' version of events is more of a story of institutional memory rather than them making unreasonable demands
Fun fact: multiple pretender defenders have attempted to prove their case by building a sort of replica based on very incomplete drawings/photos, and proved they would fly. Never mind they increased the wing area, installed modern flight controls, and used a modern engine and propellor.
The Smithsonian's version of the Langley flyer is a hilarious example of this kind of fraud.
It's not hard to pick out the factors that enabled their success. Multiple breakthroughs were needed. What is hard is to find convincing proof that anyone beat them to it.
The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless, because the largest part of the invention is collective. Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors.
Without the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont, aviation might have been created a few years later, but, overall, the consequence would have been small.
It's a big deficiency in the way history is taught, at least here in the US, it's mostly taught as Guy/Group X did Y in year ZZZZ and leaves out a lot of the context that shows how many people were often doing similar things before or simultaneously. It leads a lot of people to buy into the Great Man of History view point when there's rarely singular figures that the the principal cause, often they're just the one who won.
We had a history teacher in high school who noted that. He always tried to cover the factors that led up to an event happening. I always appreciated that.
Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".
I think there's a wide variety of ways this gets taught (in the US at least).
But if you go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where the Wright Flyer is currently on display, maybe a third of the room's displays document the achievements of the wide array of pioneers of flight besides the Wright Brothers, followed by maybe another third of the room documenting the fast followers who competed with the Wright Brothers (and many of their tragic deaths).
To discount individual achievement is such a disservice to humanity. There is absolutely an environmental benefit but i take issue with the totally BS if they didn't do it someone else would on all things is such a knee cap to individual merit and ability.
Merit and ability sit atop of the works of all humanity but without it nothing would be accomplished.
I'd be very surprised if it were unique to the US although there's probably some cultural element. There is a tendency to ascribe invention to an individual even if the real answer is an individual's lab/team or really a more complex story. E.g. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine although he came up with an innovation that made it significantly more efficient. Look at almost any significant invention and its history is... complicated. But ask who invented something and "complicated" isn't a very satisfactory answer.
FWIW when I was an aerospace major, one of the first lessons in “fundamentals of flight” as the class was named, was about the race to flight that was heating up around the time of the Wright brothers. But this was in an aerospace class, so I guess it’s less relevant. Never heard about the Brazilian guys though
Also is a deficiency in patents. Instead of giving a temporary monopoly on a genuine original idea and solution, it becomes a land rush to who can get to a newly obvious idea the fastest.
That's not how I remember learning it in grade school. There was a whole chapter on people trying and failing to achieve flight and many close calls. Then there was yet more history about other groups who achieved it after the Wright Bros.
I agree that simultaneous invention is an important concept, but I view it separately from Great Man Theory of History. GMTH is invariably trying to capture the idea that when you have a person who has a lot power, then their successes or failures can have a large impact on the rest of society. I don't dispute that they can be part of the zeitgeist of forces that are driving society, but sometimes what one person in power says matters a lot. I think it probably matters less for scientific pursuits where a lot of people are thinking about something and one person happens to be the person who got there first (not that this doesn't deserve praise either).
This applies to "negative" inventions, too: Eugenics was a pretty favorably and openly discussed concept in the early 1900s (e.g. Winston Churchill was a pretty vocal proponent), but Hitler basically gets all the credit for the whole idea.
I didn't realize that you spoke for everyone. Maybe you were taught that info by your instructor, but that doesn't mean everyone followed a similar format.
> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless,
I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative.
Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together.
Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together.
Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected.
I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.
What made Wright Brothers the first, and not Santos Dumont or other people is that they not only created the first flying machine, they developed critical _PRINCIPALS_ of heavier then air flight that is used in every fixed wing aircraft since then.
Without Wright Brothers' innovations controlled flight is simply impossible.
Other people had things that looked similar to the Wright airplanes, but only the Wright airplane was able to take off, do figure 8s in the sky, and then land.
For example the rest of the world was operating off of aerodynamic mathematics of lift and drag that was simply incorrect. The Wright brothers built the air tunnels and created the math for better ones that actually worked.
The also figured out the principals to using rudders to counter adverse yaw in controlled flight. This is the tendency of the airplane to turn (yaw) against the direction of a turn.
And there are a few things beyond that. Without this controlled flight is not possible. Without figuring these things out airplanes are not really possible.
Now would of somebody else eventually figured it out?
Sure.
But it was the Wright brothers that did it first and that is the point. This is why they were able to create the first airplane and other people didn't. Even if they looked very similar it doesn't matter because they didn't incorporate the necessary features that made the Wright's plane work.
During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries:
- *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*: Both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton formulated his version in the 1660s but didn't publish it immediately. Leibniz began his work on calculus in the 1670s and published his findings in the late 17th century. This led to a prolonged dispute over who first invented calculus.
- *Robert Hooke*: Hooke proposed ideas about planetary motion and gravitation. In the 1670s, he suggested that planets are attracted to the Sun by a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This concept influenced Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation, though the two scientists had intense arguments over the credit for this discovery.
- *James Gregory*: A Scottish mathematician, Gregory made significant contributions to calculus and series expansions. He discovered the series expansion for the inverse tangent function, known as Gregory's series, and worked on methods of calculating areas under curves, which are fundamental aspects of calculus.
These instances highlight the phenomenon of multiple discovery, where different scientists independently arrive at similar conclusions around the same time.
The show “Connections” with James Burke does a wonderful job of highlighting these sorts of overlapping of ideas and people and their collective results. Old, but well worth a watch!
We still mostly use Leibniz' dy/dx notation. Newton's fluxions and y-dot (a dot over the y) notation are largely forgotten.
The Hooke debate gave us a great quote from Newton. "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Hooke was a dwarf...)
I'm reading "The Secret Lives of Numbers" which has some fascinating deep dives into lesser taught math history (at least in western culture), including the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in India where significant contributions to calculus were made in the 1500's well before Newton and Leibniz!
Mine is how we have evidence of wheels being used on children's toys in some south american cultures but not for transportation - they fully discovered everything to create wheeled transportation, but it's suspected that living on hilly terrain made it much less advantageous and it was not adopted.
Edit1: from the source:
"Rather, and as Hernandez said (1950: 40), the ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica did not apply the concept of revolving movement to transportation “simply because they did not want to, because of atavistic concepts worthy of being taken into account.” In a perceptive way, Hernández emphasized the indigenous ethos towards sacrifice and the offering of physical effort to the deities. Today, in Western thought, the constant technological innovation that leads to consumerism is valued, but in other cultures - ancient and modern - greater value is given to conservatism."
Actually, this makes me think the opposite. This is a great example actually.
Polyurethane wheels weren't introduced to skateboarding until 1971. It took off in popularity due to this because the previous wheels were made of clay and were basically terrible.
I don't know the history of luggage wheels, but it sounds like it was waiting for the invention of the polyurethane wheel.
My favourite is that humanity had fire, baskets, ropes and silk by 3500 BCE, but it took thousands of years before anyone combined them into a hot air balloon.
We could have been flying in the neolithic period.
I had a wheeled suitcase in probably the late 70s--which was an unstable wheeled traditional suitcase. (i.e. narrow configuration with a high center of gravity.)
Not sure why it took a while for manufacturers to reimagine to a more stable orientation.
There was some parallel technical innovation--such as the wheels and bearings for rollerblades--that was going on during the 80s.
I agree, which is why the Wright Brothers less "invented flight" than "had the first sustained engine-powered flight." A lot of historical documents describe it similarly to the latter, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
I think there's a loose threshold for when something is "viable," and that becomes the genesis of invention. Even in the Wright Brothers' case, the first flight was viable only in demonstration, there was no practical application for a few generations of aircraft.
And as this article highlights, US hegemony kind of ruled via the "winners write history" theory. Which is why some people still say Edison invented the light bulb.
This is classic survivorship bias. We don’t know about the things that didn’t get invented because someone somewhere didn’t do a critical breakthrough, because those things don’t exist. Therefore, it’s easy for people to assume that everything eventually gets invented, and nothing really hinges on a single person.
We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.
> We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.
No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other critical technologies that were necessary to make steam engines more than a toy.
I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. And how the pieces come together can change the course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016 and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again.
So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down.
You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.
GP is talking about something else, and arguably in agreement with your view: for a technology to come about and stick, you need a perfect storm: all the pieces being available and a source of continued demand for it. The former you need for an invention to be made; the latter you need for it to survive - to continue being made and to spread worldwide.
WRT. rocketry, this is a story of technology getting almost, but not quite there - it was all evolving at a rapid pace, until suddenly demand disappeared. It's not that demand for rockets wasn't there at all - just not at the price point which designs from the 80s/90s commanded What Elon did with SpaceX, was to focus on dropping the price. That involved revisiting the reusable boosters idea, which didn't pan out then because they didn't have to worry about money as much. It got perfected and productized by SpaceX now, because it was a road to cheaper launches - and they got them cheap enough to meet the existing demand (and create more of it).
I used to watch a show called Connections. Things can exist in other fields that cross over and make other fields absolutely ignite with interesting possibilities.
SpaceX is taking existing tech and rebuilding it up from ground up principles. It is the method they are applying to all of his businesses. Get something working. Then go back and throw everything out until it stops working. Then put that thing back. Then throw out more. The idea is if you still work perfectly fine without something you did not need it. Following the optimization method of 'the most optimal thing is the thing that is not there.' It is what took Tesla from a bespoke 1-5 cars per year company to the capability to build thousands per week. It is a brutal painful process that works.
The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire
Archimedes even demonstrated the principle of heated water caising a sphere to rotate
But there was little use for it, without substantial investment in other areas. Horses for land transportand human rowers for ships were just cheaper and more practical
It would take another 1500 years before Watt found its use for a pump
I think we can say that a successful airplane was inevitable in the early 20th century because of the other work being done in the field at the time. Other designs were getting close, but didn't quite have the necessary combination of power to weight and lift to drag. The most important innovation from the Wrights was the realization that aerodynamic roll control was necessary; it's harder to say how many years would have been needed for someone else to try that.
That's not to say the same thing is true for any other invention or technological advance.
> Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together.
Perhaps invention is slightly different, but in the empirical sciences there's a bunch of stuff that occurred at roughly the same time:
Science and technology are closely related, as the latter builds on the former, and so it is often the case that sometimes a little bit of luck / timing determines who is "first", e.g.
I think there is also a bifurcation to be had on inventions which take billions of dollars into a business to R&D and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per test vs inventions one mildly wealthy (or less) average individual can reasonably cover the investment of. The former is less about the invention making and more about the funding gathering.
The point is, the archetypal inventor is someone who has a unique flash of insight that only they could have had. Your example is of something different: that with enough funding and smart people working on a problem, great things can be achieved. Elon didn't personally have almost any of the insights, but he did supply the vision and funding.
> Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again.
Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
> You can find endless examples once you start looking
My favorite examples are gunpowder, the printing press.
Both were known by the Chinese and Koreans for thousand years before the Europeans. However, it was the Europeans that began using gunpowder in handheld guns (Chinese used it for fireworks) and combined the printing press with metallic moveable types and oily ink, making it far more efficient.
Also: how much James Watt improved the already existing steam engine.
> Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993.
Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?
> the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993.
Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump engines.
This is why I say people that say private capitalism is what moves the world tech forward are wrong. From Rockets, Nuclear, Robots, Internet, Cars, Planes, Semi Conductors, Satellites all these came about from government investment in loss making technology or by heavily subsidizing the production for war until it reached profitability.
Why do you keep giving engineering credit to a Paypal Billionaire? By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? I guess none other than opening a check book?
Saying “who invented this?” is how the collective celebrates, strengthens and participates in its own tradition. In every field the neophyte meets illustrious predecessors who paved the way.
It’s one of the reasons I disagree with NDT and other popular scientists that Newton was the greatest scientist. Einstein was singular in that respect that he was the only one even thinking about spacetime as a geometric entity. Calculus and gravity, were already all things others were working on and making similar strides. Newton just got there first and while he’s definitely a unique genius and impressive in the breadth of things he accomplished, that takes away for me when comparing him with Einstein.
I think his most unique work may have been the contributions to optics but stacked up against a fundamental description of what gravity and time are that completely changed our thinking on it… Not to mention that still to this day 100 years later we’re building machines to verify some of Einstein’s predictions. Oh and he invented the idea of lasers despite not believing in quantum mechanics.
Not to mention that Newton’s foundational contributions to math and science stopped around 28 when he started focusing on alchemy and other things. By comparison Einstein kept making contributions to physics throughout his life and his contributions “stopped” when he focus on the grand unifying theory trying to bridge quantum mechanics and relativity, a problem still unsolved 70 years after his death despite an accelerating understanding and technology in the world of physics.
Not discounting Einstein's singular contributions, but he had help in putting Riemannian (also called Bolshai-Lobachevsky in other parts of the world ;)) geometry to use:
> This idea was pointed out by mathematician Marcel Grossmann and published by Grossmann and Einstein in 1913.[7]
It is nationalist. Type in "Hungarian inventions".
You will see: computer (Neumann), holography, discovery of vitamin C, ballpoint pen, helicopter, electric locomotive, telephone exchange, Word and Excel, and so forth.
I mean, I am Hungarian, so what? Why should I be proud "to be Hungarian" because those things were invented by Hungarians (outside of Hungary, mostly in the US I believe)? I don't get it.
> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless
Perhaps you're right in a technical/technological sense. But there's a deeper question I think we need to explore: will we as American citizens be patriots? (where by patriots I mean simply people who love their country and fellow countrymen/women and have a shared cultural identity).
Brazil ought to be lauded for their fierce patriotism. Their insistence that Dumont is the real inventor is great - it means they care about their shared history and cultural identity. It's part of how Brazilians as a people-group care about and love one another. US citizens ought to feel the same way about the Wright brothers. As a citizen myself, I'm proud to say that the Wright brothers were the first to fly an airplane that carried a human. It matters to me because this is my country. If you're a US citizen, it should matter to you too.
--
Zooming out a bit... A house divided against itself cannot stand. Love is what holds families together. To love family members is to care for and prefer them more than people outside the family -- that is a good thing. A strong family with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the family.
In the same way, a country divided against itself cannot stand; and love is what holds countries together. To love fellow countrymen/women is to care and prefer them more than people outside the country -- that is a good thing. A strong country with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the country.
We need that in the US (and many places in the West) again. TA isn't so much about who is "right" but the difference between Brazilian national identity and the USA (which used to have a strong national identity).
This kind of patriotism makes little sense to me. It's like football hooligans fighting over their favorite sports teams.
My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident of birth. I'll support my country when they do things I think are good. I'll support other countries when they do things I think are good. Supporting your own country even when they are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.
Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important? National identity is a relatively recent concept so it’s clearly not essential or fundamental to human culture. It’s not clear to me why I should care more about people in New York (2000 miles away but part of the same geopolitical entity) more than people in Brazil.
Can you provide an example of this? There are a few inventions-via-serendipity (e.g. Teflon) where someone got lucky, but few that i can think of where the specific person who got lucky mattered. Kary Mullis and PCR maybe?
Which was an amazing achievement for the time: It was (one of?) the first tail-plane configuration in the world. And also one of the first airplane to be mass produced.
This configuration is still used on almost all commercial airplane today and differed from the "canard" configuration of the Wright's flyer.
Even 120 years later, "La demoiselle" looks weirdly "modern" as an airplane configuration.
Well, the Wright brothers invented an aeroplane. Their most important contribution was the use of wing warping to allow the control of roll. Wing warping turned out to be less practical than the approach still used today: the aileron. A patent owned by the Wright's on wing warping caused a lot of pointless legal conflict and arguably slowed down the pace of innovation with respect to the problem[1].
Various improvements to machinery during the industrial revolution were only possible with vast amounts of investment upfront, and the patent system made that possible. You're not going to be building a factory powering steam engine at home, even if you've found a method that will increase its efficiency by a significant margin.
Of course, patents are only respected when a country is in the lead. Early America was notorious for espionage and strategically ignoring patents to bolster its own economy, and China doesn't really care about what patents you may have when one of their companies is competing with you.
Or to expand this a bit more - they learned and documented how to have controlled flight. They were the first ones to have flights measured in hours. Big difference from just a one off flight.
Well, I wasn't convinced by the Brazilians' argument that catapults don't count, but then Otto Lilienthal's flights should also count. Either you want completely unaided flight, and Dumont did it first, or you don't, and Lilienthal's flights are the first.
Dumont did it first in the sense that he achieved a flight long enough, i.e. over 100 meter, in order to win the prize for such a flight that had been instituted a couple of years earlier.
A half of year before Santos Dumont, also in Paris, there had been other flight attempts that had succeeded to take off completely unaided, by rolling on wheels (by Traian Vuia), but the achieved lengths of sustained flight had been much shorter, too short to qualify for any prize.
So while the achievements of Santos Dumont are very commendable, the word "invention" is not really appropriate for them, because all he had done was to do better some of the things already done by others in their attempts to win the French flight prizes.
The Wright brothers have started from Otto Lilienthal's work. While their improvements have been extremely important, their work has also not started from zero, but it had built upon the work of the predecessors.
In the history of inventions, it is typically impossible to say that something has really begun with some inventor. Instead of that, the right way is to point to each inventor and show what they have done better than what existed before them.
The only source that will respond Ford invented the car is a person who has no idea and is simply guessing the first name comes to mind. It can't really even be contested since Benz's and Ford's inventions are decades apart.
Nobody claims Ford invented the car. Its undisputed in the mainstream that Karl Benz did. What Ford achieved was making it into a viable mass market product. Ford's inventions had less to do with the car itself and more with the process of mass production. Ford's system was incredibly influential and very wide reaching. But the car was very much invented and known before he did that.
Thats actually more interesting that LLMs answer based on language questions are asked, I never thought to test that. It would be nice if we got to a point where you train an LLM to genuinely figure out these nuances and fix its own model.
If it makes you feel better, in the U.S. we learn that the Wright brothers used Lilienthal's glider data extensively in the R&D phases of their work. He managed to gather a lot of data on gliders and glide slopes which informed the brothers' earlier work. Their achievement summits their peers only in qualifications, the first:
The Wrights did use Lilienthal's data for their earlier gliders, but it turned out to be off by a factor of 2. That is why the Wrights built a wind tunnel to determine the correct values.
Lol - when I studied aerospace in France the hagiography literature was all about Louis Breguet and Louis Bleriot. I don't recall mention (i.e. in general conversation, offhand references in non-formal literature, or on posters, etc.) about the Wright brothers.
Oddly I don't recall much mention of Alberto Santos-Dumont either so, go figure.
This reminds me of a somewhat related topic - who won the space race? Growing up in Soviet Union, we were taught that it was the USSR - when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Then I came to the US, and was taught that it was the US, when Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon.
No-one ever really set the goalpost of the Space Race, so it can be whichever you want. I personally like to consider the Apollo–Soyuz mission as the true finish of the space race, where the two nations docked their spacecraft together, and an astronaut and a cosmonaut shook hands in space.
In the end the big winner of the Space Race was humanity, in the massive scientific leap forward that it created.
I think it's pretty obvious in hindsight that the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here. The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets. Putting a man on the moon showed that America was vastly more capable on a technical level, but that wasn't really the point of the space race.
It's also why governments are carefully watching North Korea's space program, even if they'll never be able to put a man on the moon. Their ability to launch a sattelite into orbit makes them a threat, whether or not they can make a moon lander has little real value beyond vanity.
> The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets.
The US and the Soviets had operational ICBMs at pretty much the same time-- dueling milestones from 1957 to 1959.
Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs.
Then the US caught up and surpassed them.
Then both stagnated; Russia did a slightly better job in choosing priorities for human spaceflight; the US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight.
> the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here
On the one hand, yes absolutely.
On the other hand -- which is more exciting? The "space race" of getting the first man in space and back, or the "moon race" of getting the first man on the moon and back?
I think it's fair to say the "moon race" was a far greater event in human history, to set foot on another world. Yes, the US shifted the goalposts... but at the same time the new goalposts seem like the more momentous event in human history. Think of how people across the world tuned in for live TV footage of the moon landing.
That's not really the full story. The US didn't come up with the moon goal. It was the Soviets' plan already, which is why JFK publicly announced it in a speech: to force them into a public prestige battle. The Soviets had the habit of repeated private failure. If they achieved something, they'd announce it afterwards; if they failed, they kept quiet. The US broadcast launches on TV and pre-announced goals, which was a major propaganda effort and much more effective than post-flight releases.
Growing in the Soviet Union, you should also remember the story that the airplane was invented by Mozhaysky, radio by Popov, lightbulb by Ladygin, and so on. No one in the US disputes who the first man in space was - the narrative rather highlights the US achievements. The soviets (and Russia) take it to the next level. It took me a while to understand why none of my colleagues have ever heard of Ostrogradskiy and Kotelnikov theorems
It was the race that moon the US one. The USSR was the first into space both with a spacecraft orbiting and living beings.
Maybe people interpret what they learned differently but I don’t think they were taught the US won the space race. Of course the goalposts will be moved to claim the glory.
I wasn’t taught that it was Yuri who won but rather Sputnik.
I like to think of it as a contest of one-upmanship.
Eventually the US did something the Soviets could not in the most difficult category of space exploration, which is manned spaceflight. If they'd gotten their manned lunar program done, they would have kept the Space Race going, and the US would have had to find another first. But they didn't.
If you live in Germany, the Wright brothers may have "invented" the airplane, but Hans Grade was the person who made the airplane practically usable: :-)
> and before, Otto Lilienthal invented the glider, i.e. he made the idea of heavier-than-air aircraft a reality
The Wright brothers were very aware of Lilienthal and his contributions.
Wilbur Wright, speaking to the Society of Western Engineers in Chicago, September 1901:
> The difficulties which obstruct the pathway to success in flying-machine construction are of three general classes: (1) Those which relate to the construction of the sustaining wings; (2) those which relate to the generation and application of the power required to drive the machine through the air; (3) those relating to the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight. Of these difficulties two are already to a certain extent solved.
> This inability to balance and steer still confronts students of the flying problem, although nearly eight years have passed. When this one feature has been worked out, the age of flying machines will have arrived, for all other difficulties are of minor importance.
> Herr Otto Lilienthal seems to have been the first man who really comprehended that balancing was the first instead of the last of the great problems in connection with human flight. He began where others left off, and thus saved the many thousands of dollars that it had theretofore been customary to spend in building and fitting expensive engines to machines which were uncontrollable when tried. He built a pair of wings of a size suitable to sustain his own weight, and made use of gravity as his motor.
> Lilienthal not only thought, but acted; and in so doing probably made the greatest contribution to the solution of the flying problem that has ever been made by any one man. He demonstrated the feasibility of actual practice in the air, without which success is impossible. Herr Lilienthal was followed by Mr. Pilcher, a young English engineer, and by Mr. Chanute, a distinguished member of the society I now address. A few others have built gliding machines, but nearly all that is of real value is due to the experiments conducted under the direction of the three men just mentioned.
> We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five hours’ practice, spread out; in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts.
The Wright brothers found that Lilienthal’s method of controlling an airplane was never going to work, and devised something that would. That was their invention. Nothing more, nothing less.
My parents used to take me to Stanford Hall occasionally where there was an exhibit about Percy Pilcher, I suppose it was free to get in. I always found looking up at the waxwork's face slightly disturbing: https://stanfordhall.co.uk/family-history/the-percy-pilcher-...
"Vor einem knappen halben Jahr feierte die Technikwelt den 40. Jahrestag der "Mother of all Demos", die am 9. Dezember 1968 die Computermaus an die Öffentlichkeit brachte. Demo-Leiter Douglas Engelbart gilt seitdem als Erfinder des immer noch genialsten und griffigsten Eingabegeräts der Informatik.
Diese Ansicht muss jedoch korrigiert werden, denn schon einige Wochen vorher erschien eine Publikation der Firma Telefunken, die ein Input-Instrument vorstellte, das an Monitoren hing und funktionell der Engelbart-Maus gleichkam: die so genannte Rollkugel. Seit den frühen 70er-Jahren wurde sie zusammen mit Telefunken-Rechnern verkauft und in der Praxis eingesetzt, und mindestens ein Exemplar hat in einem Museum überlebt."
Google Translate:
"Almost half a year ago, the technology world celebrated the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos," which introduced the computer mouse to the public on December 9, 1968. Since then, the demo's leader, Douglas Engelbart, has been considered the inventor of what is still the most ingenious and handy input device in computer science.
This view, however, must be corrected, because a few weeks earlier, a publication by the Telefunken company appeared, introducing an input device that hung from monitors and was functionally equivalent to the Engelbart mouse: the so-called trackball. Since the early 1970s, it was sold alongside Telefunken computers and used in practice, and at least one example has survived in a museum."
Readit News
1. First 3-axis flight controls
2. First propellor theory that was twice the efficiency of other airscrews
3. First aircraft engine that had twice the power/weight of other engines
4. First design that used a wind tunnel to get an efficient wing shape
5. First directed research and development program to identify the problems and solve them one by one, with the results culminating in the 1903 Flyer
6. Properly documented everything with photographs, notebooks and witnesses
7. The Flyer is hanging in a museum today, and exacting replicas have been built and flown exhibiting the same documented flight characteristics as the Flyer.
If you look at other contenders, they were all lacking these points. For example, with the Wright propellor, engine, and airfoil their craft had an enormous advantage over other designs that were trial and error.
All modern aircraft can trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, and no other claimant. The others were all developmental dead ends.
P.S. About the catapult thing - are airplanes launched from aircraft carriers not airplanes? Besides, the 1903 Flyer did not use a catapult.
¹–my 2nd spot goes to John Moses Browning – also, whose 120+ year designs are not only still in use, they're still in production.
That pure drive of doing something out of sheer interest and refusal to accept failure is really inspirational. I wish I had half the drive they did!
And if you build an airplane so absurdly advanced that 70+ years later people still think it was aliens that built it, you've set your mark in the history books.
Third place in my heart takes the Rutan Voyager [2] which essentially pushed its efficiency so hard that it coincidentally invented the design for modern delivery drones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager
New Zealand has its own contentious "powered flight" claimant Richard Pearse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
Self-promotion and patriotism often are the biggest influence on what the narrative becomes (e.g. Edison, space race).
2. There's a lot of question about Pearse's first flight, as to its date and whether it happened at all - because Pearse left behind no photos, drawings, documentation, or the airplane.
3. Edison's claims are fully documented, witnessed, patented, and litigated.
The Wrights based their wing on Lilienthal's who used a variant of a wind tunnel (as well as actual gliders) for optimizations.
You could also argue he ran a coherent research program too, just it was sadly stopped by his fatal flying accident.
https://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/ewright.htm
> 3. First aircraft engine that had twice the power/weight of other engines
The other points seem good but I’m a little skeptical of these—“the first 2x improvement” generally seems like a less impressive metric in the sense that when a field is early and thing are just getting started, large-multiplier improvements are pretty common, right? The first 2x improvement to engine power/weight in an airplane could just be the result of being the first ones to seriously look at the problem.
As a field matures, the multipliers might get much smaller as the low hanging fruit is picked out. The last 2x improvement might be more impressive actually.
The Wrights made a breakthrough in realizing that a propellor was a rotating wing, and developed the first theory of propellors enabling them to build one that was 90% efficient. This is as opposed to the flat bladed screws used by other experimenters which were 50% efficient.
This means a near doubling of power for the same weight of engine and drive train.
The Wrights could not find an existing engine with the desired power/weight, and the engine makers refused to design/build one. Hence they hired a machinist to help design/build a custom engine, with double the power/weight ration of existing engines. The Wrights developed the very first practical aviation gas engine.
This was an enormous factor in creating a successful airplane.
P.S. Fun fact: Santos Dumont was a rather tiny man. In the movie "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" they created several flying replicas of early machines, including Dumont's "Demoiselle". But the Demoiselle wouldn't fly, it just ran around the field nailed to the ground. Finally, the engineers realized that Dumont was a tiny man, and located a tiny pilot, and then the Demoiselle flew delightfully. So, Dumont had his own peculiar advantage in power/weight.
The Wright flyer could and frequently did do circles around the field for several minutes after being catapulted. It was no glider.
Motor gliders self-launch.
The Wrights are giants in the history of aviation for reasons like those you describe whether or not they were first.
From the perspective of their patents and the multi-year monopoly that they exploited with everything from aircraft sales to the military to flying schools being first is certainly critical.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been taught the Wrights were first all my life. But I live in the US.
For example, they had flat propellors without an airfoil. This means they needed nearly twice the power. Their engines would have been twice as heavy, too. They didn't have useful flight controls. Their wings looked smaller than the Flyer's.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The Wrights had every bit of evidence needed. None of the others did.
https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-E...
https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
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Actually, initially they even fought to have people believe in their success. They weren't that great at public relations, and it took a while for people to believe they had a working airplane.
There was also a feud with the Smithsonian. Until the forties, the Smithsonian considered a competing aircraft to be the first airplane (also related to Curtiss). In 1948 the Wright estate sold the first plane to the Smithsonian for a dollar, but the agreement stipulated that
"Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the 1903 Wright Aeroplane, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."
I guess this partially explains why the Americans only know about the Wright brothers as the original inventors of the airplane, as opposed to various national heroes in other countries.
Oh an btw, talking about companies. The company the Wright brothers founded still exists - it's now Curtiss-Wright, I guess Wright eventually merged with their worst enemy (and a bunch of other companies).
Too bad the Wright brothers didn't continue their developments as successfully as they started, and struggled to make it big on top of their invention. At least they got the recognition eventually.
Btw, the Smithsonian has a cool exhibit on the Wright brothers, really encourages to you read up on them. [1]
[1] e.g. here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers)
I'm not saying you're wrong but that's not really proving your point.
All heavier-than-air powered aircraft. Balloons and unmanned gliders have a different history, them having existing long before the 1900s.
The Smithsonian's version of the Langley flyer is a hilarious example of this kind of fraud.
There is no sense in which he was a pretender. He had been “open source” flying for years.
Without the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont, aviation might have been created a few years later, but, overall, the consequence would have been small.
Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".
But if you go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where the Wright Flyer is currently on display, maybe a third of the room's displays document the achievements of the wide array of pioneers of flight besides the Wright Brothers, followed by maybe another third of the room documenting the fast followers who competed with the Wright Brothers (and many of their tragic deaths).
Merit and ability sit atop of the works of all humanity but without it nothing would be accomplished.
This applies to "negative" inventions, too: Eugenics was a pretty favorably and openly discussed concept in the early 1900s (e.g. Winston Churchill was a pretty vocal proponent), but Hitler basically gets all the credit for the whole idea.
I didn't realize that you spoke for everyone. Maybe you were taught that info by your instructor, but that doesn't mean everyone followed a similar format.
I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative.
Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together.
Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together.
Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected.
I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
History is not a collection of objective records.
Without Wright Brothers' innovations controlled flight is simply impossible.
Other people had things that looked similar to the Wright airplanes, but only the Wright airplane was able to take off, do figure 8s in the sky, and then land.
For example the rest of the world was operating off of aerodynamic mathematics of lift and drag that was simply incorrect. The Wright brothers built the air tunnels and created the math for better ones that actually worked.
The also figured out the principals to using rudders to counter adverse yaw in controlled flight. This is the tendency of the airplane to turn (yaw) against the direction of a turn.
And there are a few things beyond that. Without this controlled flight is not possible. Without figuring these things out airplanes are not really possible.
Now would of somebody else eventually figured it out?
Sure.
But it was the Wright brothers that did it first and that is the point. This is why they were able to create the first airplane and other people didn't. Even if they looked very similar it doesn't matter because they didn't incorporate the necessary features that made the Wright's plane work.
During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries:
- *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*: Both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton formulated his version in the 1660s but didn't publish it immediately. Leibniz began his work on calculus in the 1670s and published his findings in the late 17th century. This led to a prolonged dispute over who first invented calculus.
- *Robert Hooke*: Hooke proposed ideas about planetary motion and gravitation. In the 1670s, he suggested that planets are attracted to the Sun by a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This concept influenced Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation, though the two scientists had intense arguments over the credit for this discovery.
- *James Gregory*: A Scottish mathematician, Gregory made significant contributions to calculus and series expansions. He discovered the series expansion for the inverse tangent function, known as Gregory's series, and worked on methods of calculating areas under curves, which are fundamental aspects of calculus.
These instances highlight the phenomenon of multiple discovery, where different scientists independently arrive at similar conclusions around the same time.
https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978
The Hooke debate gave us a great quote from Newton. "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Hooke was a dwarf...)
Edit0: A good read : https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...
Edit1: from the source: "Rather, and as Hernandez said (1950: 40), the ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica did not apply the concept of revolving movement to transportation “simply because they did not want to, because of atavistic concepts worthy of being taken into account.” In a perceptive way, Hernández emphasized the indigenous ethos towards sacrifice and the offering of physical effort to the deities. Today, in Western thought, the constant technological innovation that leads to consumerism is valued, but in other cultures - ancient and modern - greater value is given to conservatism."
Polyurethane wheels weren't introduced to skateboarding until 1971. It took off in popularity due to this because the previous wheels were made of clay and were basically terrible.
I don't know the history of luggage wheels, but it sounds like it was waiting for the invention of the polyurethane wheel.
Do you have enough flat surfaces where the wheels will work in the places people travel.
How cheap and dependable can you build it without adding too much weight to the luggage.
Are there enough people traveling and carrying their own luggage for them to purchase this.
We could have been flying in the neolithic period.
Not sure why it took a while for manufacturers to reimagine to a more stable orientation.
There was some parallel technical innovation--such as the wheels and bearings for rollerblades--that was going on during the 80s.
I think there's a loose threshold for when something is "viable," and that becomes the genesis of invention. Even in the Wright Brothers' case, the first flight was viable only in demonstration, there was no practical application for a few generations of aircraft.
And as this article highlights, US hegemony kind of ruled via the "winners write history" theory. Which is why some people still say Edison invented the light bulb.
Correct. The electric bulb had at least 12 inventors and radio communication at lest 3 inventors.
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We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.
No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other critical technologies that were necessary to make steam engines more than a toy.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
My understanding is that no, it couldn't have happened at that time because metallurgy wasn't good enough at the time for anything beyond toys.
So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down.
You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.
WRT. rocketry, this is a story of technology getting almost, but not quite there - it was all evolving at a rapid pace, until suddenly demand disappeared. It's not that demand for rockets wasn't there at all - just not at the price point which designs from the 80s/90s commanded What Elon did with SpaceX, was to focus on dropping the price. That involved revisiting the reusable boosters idea, which didn't pan out then because they didn't have to worry about money as much. It got perfected and productized by SpaceX now, because it was a road to cheaper launches - and they got them cheap enough to meet the existing demand (and create more of it).
SpaceX is taking existing tech and rebuilding it up from ground up principles. It is the method they are applying to all of his businesses. Get something working. Then go back and throw everything out until it stops working. Then put that thing back. Then throw out more. The idea is if you still work perfectly fine without something you did not need it. Following the optimization method of 'the most optimal thing is the thing that is not there.' It is what took Tesla from a bespoke 1-5 cars per year company to the capability to build thousands per week. It is a brutal painful process that works.
Archimedes even demonstrated the principle of heated water caising a sphere to rotate
But there was little use for it, without substantial investment in other areas. Horses for land transportand human rowers for ships were just cheaper and more practical
It would take another 1500 years before Watt found its use for a pump
That's not to say the same thing is true for any other invention or technological advance.
Perhaps invention is slightly different, but in the empirical sciences there's a bunch of stuff that occurred at roughly the same time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
Science and technology are closely related, as the latter builds on the former, and so it is often the case that sometimes a little bit of luck / timing determines who is "first", e.g.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray
Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
My favorite examples are gunpowder, the printing press.
Both were known by the Chinese and Koreans for thousand years before the Europeans. However, it was the Europeans that began using gunpowder in handheld guns (Chinese used it for fireworks) and combined the printing press with metallic moveable types and oily ink, making it far more efficient.
Also: how much James Watt improved the already existing steam engine.
Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?
Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump engines.
Why do you keep giving engineering credit to a Paypal Billionaire? By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? I guess none other than opening a check book?
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I think his most unique work may have been the contributions to optics but stacked up against a fundamental description of what gravity and time are that completely changed our thinking on it… Not to mention that still to this day 100 years later we’re building machines to verify some of Einstein’s predictions. Oh and he invented the idea of lasers despite not believing in quantum mechanics.
Not to mention that Newton’s foundational contributions to math and science stopped around 28 when he started focusing on alchemy and other things. By comparison Einstein kept making contributions to physics throughout his life and his contributions “stopped” when he focus on the grand unifying theory trying to bridge quantum mechanics and relativity, a problem still unsolved 70 years after his death despite an accelerating understanding and technology in the world of physics.
> This idea was pointed out by mathematician Marcel Grossmann and published by Grossmann and Einstein in 1913.[7]
(from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)
You will see: computer (Neumann), holography, discovery of vitamin C, ballpoint pen, helicopter, electric locomotive, telephone exchange, Word and Excel, and so forth.
I mean, I am Hungarian, so what? Why should I be proud "to be Hungarian" because those things were invented by Hungarians (outside of Hungary, mostly in the US I believe)? I don't get it.
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Perhaps you're right in a technical/technological sense. But there's a deeper question I think we need to explore: will we as American citizens be patriots? (where by patriots I mean simply people who love their country and fellow countrymen/women and have a shared cultural identity).
Brazil ought to be lauded for their fierce patriotism. Their insistence that Dumont is the real inventor is great - it means they care about their shared history and cultural identity. It's part of how Brazilians as a people-group care about and love one another. US citizens ought to feel the same way about the Wright brothers. As a citizen myself, I'm proud to say that the Wright brothers were the first to fly an airplane that carried a human. It matters to me because this is my country. If you're a US citizen, it should matter to you too.
--
Zooming out a bit... A house divided against itself cannot stand. Love is what holds families together. To love family members is to care for and prefer them more than people outside the family -- that is a good thing. A strong family with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the family.
In the same way, a country divided against itself cannot stand; and love is what holds countries together. To love fellow countrymen/women is to care and prefer them more than people outside the country -- that is a good thing. A strong country with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the country.
We need that in the US (and many places in the West) again. TA isn't so much about who is "right" but the difference between Brazilian national identity and the USA (which used to have a strong national identity).
My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident of birth. I'll support my country when they do things I think are good. I'll support other countries when they do things I think are good. Supporting your own country even when they are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.
Some things only exist because a single person got too outside of the groupthinking, or decided to dedicate their life into making it.
Who invented calculus? Leibniz? Newton?
Same goes to the Fast Fourier Transform, CRISPR-CAS9, etc.
Alberto Santos Dumont created the 'Demoiselle' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_Demoiselle)
Which was an amazing achievement for the time: It was (one of?) the first tail-plane configuration in the world. And also one of the first airplane to be mass produced.
This configuration is still used on almost all commercial airplane today and differed from the "canard" configuration of the Wright's flyer.
Even 120 years later, "La demoiselle" looks weirdly "modern" as an airplane configuration.
But truly pioneers: Building planes, helicopters and cars totally from scratch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Ellehammer
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron
Of course, patents are only respected when a country is in the lead. Early America was notorious for espionage and strategically ignoring patents to bolster its own economy, and China doesn't really care about what patents you may have when one of their companies is competing with you.
(there is a great book about this https://share.libbyapp.com/title/1815407 )
A half of year before Santos Dumont, also in Paris, there had been other flight attempts that had succeeded to take off completely unaided, by rolling on wheels (by Traian Vuia), but the achieved lengths of sustained flight had been much shorter, too short to qualify for any prize.
So while the achievements of Santos Dumont are very commendable, the word "invention" is not really appropriate for them, because all he had done was to do better some of the things already done by others in their attempts to win the French flight prizes.
The Wright brothers have started from Otto Lilienthal's work. While their improvements have been extremely important, their work has also not started from zero, but it had built upon the work of the predecessors.
In the history of inventions, it is typically impossible to say that something has really begun with some inventor. Instead of that, the right way is to point to each inventor and show what they have done better than what existed before them.
Edit: I cannot actually reproduce this with the automobile question, but asking ChatGPT-4o about the inventor of TV yields different answers:
Asking in German yields Paul Nipkow and Philo Farnsworth, asking in English yields Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird
Asking about Radio inventors in German yields Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, Marconi, Fessenden. In English it yields Marconi and Tesla.
- powered
- controlled
- heavier than air
- sustained
- flight
Oddly I don't recall much mention of Alberto Santos-Dumont either so, go figure.
In the end the big winner of the Space Race was humanity, in the massive scientific leap forward that it created.
It's also why governments are carefully watching North Korea's space program, even if they'll never be able to put a man on the moon. Their ability to launch a sattelite into orbit makes them a threat, whether or not they can make a moon lander has little real value beyond vanity.
The US and the Soviets had operational ICBMs at pretty much the same time-- dueling milestones from 1957 to 1959.
Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs.
Then the US caught up and surpassed them.
Then both stagnated; Russia did a slightly better job in choosing priorities for human spaceflight; the US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight.
On the one hand, yes absolutely.
On the other hand -- which is more exciting? The "space race" of getting the first man in space and back, or the "moon race" of getting the first man on the moon and back?
I think it's fair to say the "moon race" was a far greater event in human history, to set foot on another world. Yes, the US shifted the goalposts... but at the same time the new goalposts seem like the more momentous event in human history. Think of how people across the world tuned in for live TV footage of the moon landing.
Maybe people interpret what they learned differently but I don’t think they were taught the US won the space race. Of course the goalposts will be moved to claim the glory.
I wasn’t taught that it was Yuri who won but rather Sputnik.
It's quite obvious how embarrassed the US was at the whole thing.
Eventually the US did something the Soviets could not in the most difficult category of space exploration, which is manned spaceflight. If they'd gotten their manned lunar program done, they would have kept the Space Race going, and the US would have had to find another first. But they didn't.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Grade
(and before, Otto Lilienthal invented the glider, i.e. he made the idea of heavier-than-air aircraft a reality:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
)
The Wright brothers were very aware of Lilienthal and his contributions.
Wilbur Wright, speaking to the Society of Western Engineers in Chicago, September 1901:
> The difficulties which obstruct the pathway to success in flying-machine construction are of three general classes: (1) Those which relate to the construction of the sustaining wings; (2) those which relate to the generation and application of the power required to drive the machine through the air; (3) those relating to the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight. Of these difficulties two are already to a certain extent solved.
> This inability to balance and steer still confronts students of the flying problem, although nearly eight years have passed. When this one feature has been worked out, the age of flying machines will have arrived, for all other difficulties are of minor importance.
> Herr Otto Lilienthal seems to have been the first man who really comprehended that balancing was the first instead of the last of the great problems in connection with human flight. He began where others left off, and thus saved the many thousands of dollars that it had theretofore been customary to spend in building and fitting expensive engines to machines which were uncontrollable when tried. He built a pair of wings of a size suitable to sustain his own weight, and made use of gravity as his motor.
> Lilienthal not only thought, but acted; and in so doing probably made the greatest contribution to the solution of the flying problem that has ever been made by any one man. He demonstrated the feasibility of actual practice in the air, without which success is impossible. Herr Lilienthal was followed by Mr. Pilcher, a young English engineer, and by Mr. Chanute, a distinguished member of the society I now address. A few others have built gliding machines, but nearly all that is of real value is due to the experiments conducted under the direction of the three men just mentioned.
> We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five hours’ practice, spread out; in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/In...
The Wright brothers found that Lilienthal’s method of controlling an airplane was never going to work, and devised something that would. That was their invention. Nothing more, nothing less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Bl%C3%A9riot
> https://www.heise.de/news/Auf-den-Spuren-der-deutschen-Compu...
> https://www.zeit.de/news/2019-05/14/deutscher-erfinder-gibt-...
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Mallebrein
Quote from the first link:
"Vor einem knappen halben Jahr feierte die Technikwelt den 40. Jahrestag der "Mother of all Demos", die am 9. Dezember 1968 die Computermaus an die Öffentlichkeit brachte. Demo-Leiter Douglas Engelbart gilt seitdem als Erfinder des immer noch genialsten und griffigsten Eingabegeräts der Informatik.
Diese Ansicht muss jedoch korrigiert werden, denn schon einige Wochen vorher erschien eine Publikation der Firma Telefunken, die ein Input-Instrument vorstellte, das an Monitoren hing und funktionell der Engelbart-Maus gleichkam: die so genannte Rollkugel. Seit den frühen 70er-Jahren wurde sie zusammen mit Telefunken-Rechnern verkauft und in der Praxis eingesetzt, und mindestens ein Exemplar hat in einem Museum überlebt."
Google Translate:
"Almost half a year ago, the technology world celebrated the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos," which introduced the computer mouse to the public on December 9, 1968. Since then, the demo's leader, Douglas Engelbart, has been considered the inventor of what is still the most ingenious and handy input device in computer science.
This view, however, must be corrected, because a few weeks earlier, a publication by the Telefunken company appeared, introducing an input device that hung from monitors and was functionally equivalent to the Engelbart mouse: the so-called trackball. Since the early 1970s, it was sold alongside Telefunken computers and used in practice, and at least one example has survived in a museum."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers
I was surprised the first time I heard Americans attribute flight to the Wright brothers. (For reference, I was educated in Belgium)