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!
It turns out that greedy patent licensing schemes kill the patented ideas rather than lead to innovation. Patents themselves can be worthwhile for society, but we need patent lifetimes that comport to each industries typical R&D cost recoup times, not 20+ years.
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.
I am forgiving of this defect for the reason that my attempts at aircraft in Kerbal Space Program have mostly had the same issues! There is a very, very small difference in design between an unstable plane and one with practically no pitch control at all, and the ideal configuration is found just between the two.
My understanding is that this was intentional. They thought instability was needed for their desired maneuverability. Today we see this as the wrong answer to the question of whether an airplane should be stable or unstable, but it shows how far ahead they were that nobody else even knew enough to ask that question.
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 wings bend anyway. Watch 'em next time you fly.
The fuselage also twists and bends. This is why, in a long airliner, curtains are put in at intervals. This is because the twisting and bending is visible to the passengers in the back, and it unnerves them.
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.
Oh, I'm convinced that if the Wrights had disappeared in a kiln explosion, the solution to powered, controlled flight would have been developed within another 5 years or so.
The canard design was the result of the Wrights being terrified of a stall like that which killed Lilienthal. And they were correct that the canard made for a quicker response to a stall. But it was also the source of pitch instability, and was eventually dropped.
Lilienthal died in 1896. The Wrights started the project by collecting every paper they could find on aeronautical engineering. The shortcomings of the existing research are evident in the fact that the Wrights still had to develop a series of prototypes, each designed to solve a particular aspect of flight. They put the solutions all together in the 1903 Flyer.
It is, and being aware of that is crucial in having the right perspective on inventors (and same is true about scientific discoveries). That is, they're not some superhuman geniuses so far ahead the rest of humanity, that through sheer power of their minds, they can wrestle breakthroughs from the hands of gods. No, they're just specialists who were at the right time and place, and had the right experience, to be the first to pluck an invention that was already ripe for the taking.
This isn't to diminish the value of inventors. Even as all discoveries are tiny increments on top of prior work, so tiny they quickly become apparent to many people in a given field, it still takes exceptional skills, knowledge and smarts to be the first (or one of the firsts) to make that increment. That is worthy of respect. But at the same time, inventors are not critical to inventions - if not for the inventor we know, someone else would've done the same within months or years.
> an invention that was already ripe for the taking.
Powered, controlled flight was clearly not ripe for the taking at the time the Wrights embarked on solving it. See the list of their accomplisments I posted. They had to get all of them right to solve the problem. Which is another reason why I'm not buying what the pretender defenders contend.
To expand on that a bit, the Wrights clearly needed to solve multiple basic problems in order to produce a working airplane. To do this, they first identified the problems, then conducted a directed research and development program to solve them, one by one. Having solved them, they combined the results into a working airplane.
Nobody else was doing that at the time.
Without the Wrights, individual inventors might each solve one of the problems independently, and then a later individual puts it together.
The Wright approach was itself fundamentally innovative.
Agreed. It is a flaw of the media and human psychology that we shine the spotlight disproportionately. The media is almost always a caricature of reality. Scientific journals provide a more realistic view of innovation as an incremental process without as much hype.
> Feels like you’re telling a kid Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why kill the magic?
Because lying to your kids will only cost you their trust, however letting adults believe in magic leads to them making bad decisions with tragic consequences to themselves, their families, communities and countries.
Not to mention that clarifying this can lead to increased motivation to learn and discover stuff, as kids won’t think that if they are not geniuses they shouldn’t even try to create something new.
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.
Echoing my other comment on patents elsewhere in the thread, Edison's innovations had big, direct and lasting impact on the world. For example, his work is responsible for creating Hollywood as a place and symbol of US film industry - specifically because he owned most of the patents critical for movie production, and was so litigious that the filmmakers decided to all literally move to the other side of the continent to be able to infringe on those patents without consequences.
No idea if this is trustworthy but a documentary on Westinghouse claimed that Edison took credit for all of his employee's inventions. Westinghouse did not.
Those inventions were incremental progress by individual inventors. Not a directed research and development project.
If you know of one that existed prior to the Wright, I'd like to hear about it.
The Apollo program is a stellar(!) example of a directed research and development project. They started with a goal, identified the problems, solved each problem in an organized manner, and put the solutions together and accomplished the goal.
Pearse certainly did not document his experiments well. But there were multiple witnesses. It appears that he achieved flight on 31th March 1903.
The Wright brother's contributions to flight were obviously more significant due to their process but that alone does not mean that they were first.
It took several years of concerted effort for the Wrights to achieve flight. Is it possible that someone tinkering in a barn could design and build one in one go? Engine, wings, propellor, flight controls, all correctly put together? Where are the remains of his machine? His notebooks?
It's possible that Pearson did it, but highly unlikely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I've invented things that I never documented. Other people invented them later, documented it, and got the credit. That's how it works.
You’re right. The book I most recently read on the subject talked about them disassembling the rail down the hillside that the glider used and then later putting it up on flat ground. I don’t know how I missed that part, especially since the pictures of early flights clearly show the Flyer taking off from that very rail.
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.
If you read Anderson "A history of Aerodynamics" it disagrees on this point. It states that the Wright's didn't have a good way to calculate drag, and they didn't understand many of the side effects from real wings (like flow separation) which caused wrong measurements initially. Later on they apparently came back to something that was closer to Lilienthal's numbers, even though the problem simply wasn't fully understood at the time.
"When the Wright brothers compared their results with those of Lilienthal, they found some
disagreement, but not as much as they expected. As Wilbur states in his diary for October
16, 1901: "It would appear that Lilienthal is very much nearer the truth then we have
heretofore been disposed to think." [Wolko, 21]. 17 The formulas were still not producing
the lift and drag that were actually being produced. The only other possible source of error
in these equations was the Smeaton coefficient of air pressure."
> 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.
Santos Dumont was 5'4", which althogh small, not out of the real of "normal" I don't think. Jules Verne was one inch taller. He was fairly skinny too, so the weight could have been a factor. I did find a video of it, fun to see as the Demoiselle is my favorite early flyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNWPpKEZzxg
"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 had never thought to critically consider the story of the Wright brothers until reading your earlier comment and thinking “that’s not evidence they were first.”
Sure I had been aware that patents and monopolies were involved in part from reading a book about their flying school[1] when I lived in Alabama. But I didn’t connect the follow the money importance of being first until earlier today.
And now I have gone down a bit of rabbit hole.
To me, it is clear why Santos=Dumont is worth celebrating in Brazil. Because he was the first person to fly in front of a body of independent experts, we don’t have to accept claims that align with self interest and local newspapers. It seems that the Wright brothers did not fly in public until well after Santos-Dumont had.
What really fascinates me is not who was first, but the way in which I always experienced the Wright brothers story. When I read about their flying school, it seemed odd that the planes at the school were “so old fashioned” compared to those of Europe in the 1910’s…and at the larger scale how the Wright brothers story conventionally stops in 1903.
> It seems that the Wright brothers did not fly in public until well after Santos-Dumont had.
That's correct. The Wrights were secretive because they wanted to ensure they had the patents locked up before disclosure. But they were smart about ensuring there was a solid trail of evidence of thier invention.
Santos Dumont did not have 3-axis controls, though. Neither did the European airplanes that were developed. At one point, the Wrights crated their flyer and went to Europe to demonstrate it. The European airplanes were very difficult to turn (because there were no roll controls). The Wrights just blew them all away by flying in tight, controlled graceful circles.
The Europeans immediately redesigned their machines to incorporate roll control.
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.
Thanks, I didn't know about that previously, although some sorting methods might be nice. It seems like quite a lot of comments are getting nominated that seem pretty...normal.
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
Distinguished computer scientist [EDIT: engineer!], seasoned writer, and longtime HN stalwart @WalterBright? Frankly I’d be willing to imagine the AI learned what it knows from him…
I do NOT think it is AI-generated (though it might be), and that belief could be part of why you are being downvoted.
I've been watching the sentiment on AI-related comments for a while. It seems to have somewhat turned back to "if it's useful, it's okay" as long as it isn't promoted as AI.
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
I now think of myself as being the lucky one who gets to be at the right place and the right time, experiencing the act of creation is a gift from everything and everyone else that helped make it possible.
Don't feel bad. It is better to be the second person on the moon then to never land on the moon. And it's better to orbit the moon than to never leave the Earth.
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.
The evidence of the Wrights first flight consists solely of what the Wrights provided. And of course their first flight report did not describe any turning.
The only public evidence of anything is their patent application for the control method…which does not prove the veracity of their claims.
Take a look at the wings - no dihedral. That means it was unstable in roll, and would require constant turning control being applied to keep it from crashing.
> The only public evidence of anything
The Smithsonian has their design notebooks. Also, more than one exacting replica has been made, and they fly and turn.
That photo was taken on the Wright’s camera and the Wrights had complete custody of the negative.
The witnesses aren’t a particularly credible lot.
The more I looked into the details the more the story looks like a typical startup’s PR campaign. I’m not saying it is Nikola rolling its truck downhill, but the Wrights had similar incentives for a creation myth.
Like I said, I’ve been hearing the story since I was a child. Certainly a Brazilian would be problematic in terms of American exceptionalism and historically prevailing American racial views.
The Smithsonian is an organ of the state and the Wrights notebooks are again self-reported evidence…to put it another way, the Wrights now fill the same institutional role at the Smithsonian in regard to first flight as Langley did at the Smithsonian.
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 amount of documentation provided by the Wrights makes denial of their claim to being the first tauntamout to Moon landing denialism. Even several years later and with the benifit of knowing of the Wright's innovations, Santos-Dumont was barely able to get off the ground for a few hundred meters while the Wrights were flying tens of kilometers.
But that's the point -- it's all about the definition of what constitutes the first airplane, which is kind of arbitrary.
If you get off the ground for a few hundred meters, why isn't that enough to be first?
Why does it need to be tens of kilometers? Are you establishing a 1km distance minimum? Based on what?
I'm not taking any position either way. But the idea that it's "Moon landing denialism" is ludicrous. It's not about whether the Wright brothers flew. It's about how you draw the definition of "flying" as opposed to e.g. an "assisted jump", which is non-obvious.
Define powered. Powered enough to take off from a flat surface without wind? Could the Flyer III do that? Or are you allowed to have wind behind you? If so, how much? Surely not 50 knots? Where's the line?
Define controlled. Look at how much Flyer I and Flyer II crashed. Are they controlled? How controlled is controlled? Where's the line?
I'm not saying who invented the plane. I'm saying reasonable people will come up with different reasonable definitions. Different totally justifiable lines. And it's not "denialism" to appreciate that reality.
It covers your points, except it doesn't mention 3-axis control that the Wrights had in their first Flyer, and the Europeans did not have until the Wrights demonstrated flying in circles.
Yes, the Flyer III could and did take off and fly without wind or catapult.
Controlled means 3 axis control. The Flyer had all the critical elements of an airplane in place.
You seem to be misunderstanding again. You are arbitrarily defining these things. Based on what? And why is your definition more valid than someone else's?
And per your own link, the earlier Flyers did not take off without wind:
> They also ignore the records of the flights the Wrights made in 1904 and 1905, which show that the catapult wasn't always used. If the Wrights felt they had sufficient headwinds, they took off without it.
It's not clear from the article when the first time was that it took off without catapult or wind. It seems to suggest 1908?
But the larger point is that you're taking the definition of flight for granted as whatever you've defined it to be. You don't seem to be acknowledging that other people can validly disagree, and that that's OK.
I actually have a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. I'm quite comfortable with the definition of powered, controlled flight. It's not arbitrary.
The thing is, nobody else even came close to the Wright's achievement for years afterwards. No amount of cooking the definition of controlled, powered flight is going to fix that for a pretender.
This isn't about aeronautical engineering. It's not about your definitions. It's not about your degree. It's not about what came afterwards.
This is about semantic definition, and how definitions of thresholds are arbitrary to a large degree, and why it's valid to differ.
Your refusal to acknowledge that another point of view might have its own validity says a lot. But the world is a larger place than just your perspective. And that's something that has consequences far beyond anything to do with who invented the first airplane.
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.