The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil
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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.
https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-E...
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.
Can't do that in Kerbal Space Program (at least not without mods), but it works fine in meatspace
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.
Can you go a step further on why the right perspective here is important?
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.
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.
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.
It's impossible to know how many people died shy of a breakthrough they were working on, that never was realised.
Who knows, maybe some materials genius choked on a pineapple two months before the breakthrough that could have given us transparent aluminium!
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.
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!
They turned out to be fantastic engineers, but not so good at making money.
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.
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.
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 get credit for the first directed research and development project. (The Apollo project took that to an extreme!)
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.
John Harrison invented very stable clocks that could be used on an unstable platform to solve the problem.
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.
Motor gliders self-launch.
The Wright flyer could and frequently did do circles around the field for several minutes after being catapulted. It was no glider.
All heavier-than-air powered aircraft. Balloons and unmanned gliders have a different history, them having existing long before the 1900s.
> 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.
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)
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.
This paper has a similar conclusion: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...
"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."
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.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_...
Not mentioned, though, is Dumont could not turn his airplane. The Wrights could, from the first one.
The only public evidence of anything is their patent application for the control method…which does not prove the veracity of their claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer#/media/File:First...
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.
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.
The proof is unusually well documented, and has successfully overcome all kinds of criticism of it.
And these remained in Orville’s hands until after his death in 1949 and mostly the documents from 1903 are attributed to Orville’s hand.
Likewise, the Flyer was restored by Orville for display and money many years later during the period of time when Langley was credited as first. [1]
Finally, the Smithsonian is prohibited from crediting anyone else by the terms of sale for its purchase of Orville’s restoration. [2]
Basically, we have Orville’s word for everything and a contract that contractually incentivizes the Smithsonian to take it as gospel.
Again, thanks for inspiring me to go beyond the national myth and look at the Wrights critically.
[1] https://www.loc.gov/collections/wilbur-and-orville-wright-pa...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer#After_Kitty_Haw...
http://truthinaviationhistory.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-wrigh...
I'm not saying you're wrong but that's not really proving your point.
But they were not the first. Unless you cherry pick criteria to disqualify everyone else.
Which is what you’re doing.
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.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_...
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.
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.
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.
The latter has no bearing whatsoever on the former. It's very interesting in its own right, but it's completely different.
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.
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.
So thanks.
[1] https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/wright-brothers-fl...
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.
Without the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont, aviation might have been created a few years later, but, overall, the consequence would have been small.
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.
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.
If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.
Good things can happen in the private sector or the public sector. SpaceX is a good thing happening in the private sector. No one's brain has to go running to Republican-bashing and history compression to counterbalance that to avoid thinking new thoughts.
> "break[ing] something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is."
It is possible that this will occur going forward now that Elon is a de facto government official, though. Also, the engineers in 1970s NASA are what created the Space Shuttle.
Sure we do, just watch For All Mankind :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)
Uh, SpaceX didn't come into being until 2002. And the Space Shuttle was not in any way cheap, nor a pile of things we did with it. Nor did the US Government in any way subsidize SpaceX, anymore then it "subsidizes" paper manufacturers by... ordering paper for its printers. It contracted with SpaceX for commercial services at a fixed price, and has saved billions and billions of dollars as a result. You seem a touch confused on timelines here.
And my entire point was that whatever could have been done, it wasn't. As I said, the government absolutely could have pursued other far fundamentally better concepts at the end of Apollo. Or it could have done commercial way earlier, getting out of the launch business entirely and working to switch over to a competitive private market 30-40 years earlier. What actually happened is that without the focus and level of discipline provided by a big ambitious goal and national spirit as a guiding star, more typical political incentives crept in and rapidly distorted the space program. Which resulted in enormous waste and stagnation as well as killing a lot of incredible people for no reason.
But regardless of how it happened, again the point is that it wasn't the scientific and tech environment that created a small window of a few years where inevitably practical economic mass launch designs would come about. It still took the right vision and right spark.
So yea, definitely a prudent investment. But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing. And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
No, the initial NASA contract was for cargo delivery via the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which dated to 2006. CRS and CC came significantly afterwards. Momentum did build but it was in fits and starts. It's a pretty fascinating bit of history in turns of twists and turns on both the political and technical sides, I highly recommend taking a look at the book Liftoff if you're at all curious. Like, even if it was selfish motivations it's worth noting that Commercial Crew probably would not have happened in 2010 without the support of Boeing itself.
>But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing.
Eh, I wouldn't fully agree with this sentiment honestly. The future we've arrived at was definitely not clear when the contracts were signed, and shit happens. If you're really serious about developing a new capability and place a few fully independent investment bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which would work and which wouldn't. That's just how it works. It's worth noting here too that Boeing has lost enormous amounts of money on its failures with Starliner. NASA has held them to the fixed price aspect of the contract. I suppose an argument could be made that NASA was more generous with milestone payments then they might have been, but at the same time that ultimately was Boeing shooting itself in the foot and NASA giving them rope because getting some money earlier didn't change the total pot at all. So if Boeing rushed, well that came back to bite them very hard.
>And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
Sure, that’s true. But my point is that those initial investments were a subsidy. They weren’t buying a product that already existed, they were paying someone to develop a product so that they could buy the product once it existed. It definitely paid off, even counting the money spent on Starliner.
> That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
Agreed. I am just saying that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. At this point we’d be better off cancelling SLS and doing our next moon mission by launching smaller craft into Earth orbit on Falcon Heavy and docking them together. Like Apollo but with several launches spread out over a week instead of a single giant rocket. We could even assemble a cycler that way.
Currently, almost half of NASAs budget is spent on manned space flight.
Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?
Orbital is what actually provides any significant economic value. But the nature of the Rocket Equation, effects with atmosphere, and how those interact with the limits of our material science means that there is an absolutely enormous gulf between a sounding rocket and getting to orbital velocity and back again. All of that is what makes it so hard but it's also required to be of any real practical use. So the DC-X was a noteworthy historical milestone/demo and test bed but going from there to something like the Falcon 9 let alone Starship takes an tremendous amount of further innovation and engineering (and investment of course). The new engine work alone SpaceX has done is a hufe deal and is what defines the envelope for the rest of the system.
The first few launches were very difficult. A NASA project with 10 crashes would have been destroyed by the press and congress.
The superpower of Elon is to shield the technical team from the negativity, pipe it to null and post "close but no ciggar".
Once Apollo was running the success rate was 100%, with no boosters lost - an incredible achievement, not just of tech but of project management.
NASA of the day didn't need shielding, because it was already doing the job with no excuses.
I think in he previos programs they had unmanned missions, but once they reached Apollo they (always?) have to use manned missions because docking was not automated. Once you have persons inside the rockets they should not explode, so you must be extra careful with the design.
> because it was already doing the job with no excuses.
We will have to wait until someone makes another cheap reusable rocket to know how hard it is to design them without exploding a few of them. The move fast and break think applied to rocket science may be a brilliant strategy or a stupid excuse, but we will not know until someone else try. (I'm not counting the Space Shuttle. It was not reusable, it was expansively refurnishable after month of work.)
I would have thought that a leader is judged by their results, and regardless of personal feelings for Elon - one can't argue that he managed to build SpaceX where many others would have failed. Could NASA have built something just as good? Possibly, but history doesn't do hypotheticals.
fake quote> He is rich only because his father had an esmerald mine, and he can not even build rockets with 1960 technology.
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?
Why didn't BlueOrigin surpass SpaceX? Is it only a funding issue?
My take - a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".
You do know Bezos has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton unlike Musk, right?
https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creator-says-elon-m...
> He asked, 'How do I run this Python script?'" Palmer said, per Crikey.
That is exactly what a programmer would ask, python scripts are not self contained they have a lot of dependencies, also typically you need to invoke them with a lot of parameters.
In addition not all programmers are python programmers, getting some commands you need in order to get started is just run of the mill when you get code from someone.
(Arguably, the best thing Musk did for SpaceX as a businessman was to delegate all the business to someone else. He tends to ruin companies where he does not.)
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.
That's not to say the same thing is true for any other invention or technological advance.
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
Part of the steam engine's success was how it contributed to itself - it helped mine coal that would fuel it, and that would fuel furnaces in which steel was made, some of that steel going into... making more engines - and all of that moved around by means of steam power.
*Factorio vibes intensify*
You had to have enough pieces together: demand for coal and steel and moving them distances, sustained long enough to exhaust simple options, and become a problem the steam engine could solve. It was then that the steam engine turned this into self-reinforcing loop, and kickstarted the modern world.
I think this is the blog in question, and the most relevant part. If something else comes to me, I'll share it here.
Which came about by the merchant fleet of the British empire.
So long as you don't also add the "useful" qualification. If you want useful steam engines you things that didn't exist then. The iron alloys available to the Romans didn't allow for useful steam engines. Even the first steam engines were only useful in deep coal mines (where fuel was practically free) which the Romans didn't have.
I read here on HN that this might be not really true. Because the romans did not heavily invest into high pressure chambers, aka cannons, like it was done in medival times. You don't just need a metal pot to build a steam engine. They must be able to hold much pressure and if they don't, they explode.
So the romans likely would have been able to make it work, but it would have required a significant investment - as they did not had experience in building pressure chambers.
They had basic concepts but could not have produced a steam engine that did useful work.
The Archimedes device you mention (the aeolipile) was basically a kettle mounted on an axle that did indeed spin. But it had no way of building up pressure to the degree necessary to move something other than itself.
The Romans probably didn't have good enough materials tech to build vessels that could hold sufficient pressure to do useful work. Early steam engines could explode catastrophically and they were built by cultures that had centuries of cannon-making experience behind them. The Romans also lacked a compelling application that would have driven tech development and didn't have the iron/steel/coal industry required to build railways, etc.
It's telling that the first commercially viable steam engines were basically water pumps for getting water out of mines, and it didn't matter if they were massive and underpowered. It took another 60/70 years for the tech to improve enough to power vehicles.
IIRC I read somewhere it depended on the previous development of firearms, as it allowed metalworking to advance enough to produce metal tubes with very smooth and regular bores, that avoid leaks, jamming and uncontrolled explosions, to be fitted with pistons. The Roman empire had no firearms.
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).
Public enterprise can be great because it enables societies to leverage huge amounts of capital (at one point, the US was spending 4% of GDP on the Apollo program each year--the equivalent of $1 Trillion/year today) to accomplish goals that are beyond the capacity of private industry at the time. It suffers from being totally divorced from the normal constraints of economy, and so tends to way overspend (4% of GDP is frankly insane) and to get stuck at local maxima (see SLS).
Private enterprise is basically the opposite. It can never match the government in terms of spending big to pull tech forward by decades--the profit margin doesn't really work that way. But it lavishly rewards the efficient allocation of capital, which (so long as there is meaningful competition) creates a drive to constantly improve tech. It's painful to think about where rocket tech would be without the recent advances born of private capital!
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.
Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump engines.
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.
Ever lugged a huge wheel-less piece of luggage around a big railway station? I have. It is hell.
Traveling salespeople etc. would often go on relatively short trips, even in the steam engine era. We underestimate mobility of pre-WWII people by a lot...
The point about simpler clothing is really interesting. I can imagine that this could be the crucial difference.
> The first railway hotels in London were built at Euston. Two hotels designed by Hardwick opened in 1839 on either side of the Arch; the Victoria on the west had basic facilities while the Euston on the east was designed for first-class passengers
And in Manchester:
> The Grand Junction Railway, Britain's first trunk line, was completed between Curzon Street railway station in Birmingham and Warrington Bank Quay railway station, Warrington, on 4 July 1837. Through trains began to convey passengers from the station to Birmingham, and a separate booking office and waiting room were provided. From 17 September 1838 there were through carriages to London Euston by some trains after completion of the London and Birmingham Railway in that year. This increase in long-distance services resulted in one of the first private railway hotels opening in Liverpool Road.
Here it is: https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/tours/tour1/area1pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_railway_station#Old_sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Liverpool_Road_rail...
Although perhaps I misunderstand your point--if your point is about someone else carrying the bags, maybe. But if that's the case, then why restrict it to flying, as opposed to travel by train or car?
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."
Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian civilizations in the new world, and poor llamas cannot cut it.
It's thought the moyai on Easter Island were moved into place rolled on logs, they didn't have oxen or horses either, but rolling on logs or if they'd built a wheeled trailer make it much easier for a group of humans to move them without damage than just be dragging or rocking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramics_of_Indigenous_peoples...
https://www.wheelbarrows.co.uk/evolution-of-the-wheelbarrow/
Eventually. Horses only became extinct in the New World around 10,000 years ago — somewhere between 15,000 and 6,000 years after humans arrived.
The pre-Columbian civilizations (and by that I mean the highly organized socially stratified societies that we are aware of) only emerged several millennia after the paleo-Indians hunted horses to extinction, though.
They didn’t have the specific skill of making cart wheels.
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.
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.
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 usually like to take the example of WWI, it was probably going to happen regardless in Europe eventually. But King Wilhelm II was an individual that has specific psychological aspects that drove it to happen the way it did. A different king would not have created the alliance situation that made the specific powers fight on their specific side. If King Wilhelm didn't try and emulate and thus alienate England, we might have seen England and Germany against Russia and France.
Furthermore, the people who underpin various states and societies (and the cultures and movements that shape them) do ultimately choose who rules them. Leaders only have freedom of action within the window of what their political capitol affords them. The people, or even just the ones that call the shots (this should be a familiar concept if you've ever seen a TV show centered around a medieval royal family) very much do set that window. Grant and Eisenhower's "failure" to thoroughly exploit conquered territory would have made them unsuitable for further leadership in antiquity for that matter yet they were both more or less instantly elevated by the existing power structure and elected to the highest office.
It's great like a Great White Shark is great. Great like Great Britain is great. Large, impactful, encompassing. A person is said to be a "Great Person" if they are seen to have a disproportionately large impact on the course of history. It is this premise, of some individuals being able to have such disproportionate impacts (rather than everything being a product of the times) that certain philosophers and historians have objected to. It wasn't out of concern that we might be glorifying nasty people with the term; if that were it then we could simply change the terminology to "Impactful People" or something like that. Those who've lodged serious objections to the premise of great people would not be placated by this change in words.
But can anybody seriously say that if not for Napoleon, there surely would have been some other French general, inspired by Julius Caesar to conquer everything he could, who was simultaneously also a master tactician with enough skill to get as far as Napoleon did? I can buy the premise that somebody else in that political environment might have tried, but to get so far and embroil most of the world in war as Napoleon did wasn't a deterministic predictable consequence of the circumstance. You can probably predict a civil war, but not the Napoleonic Wars.
If "great man theory" is 100% false and each person is 100% replaceable with no change for historical events, why complain so much that $POLITICIAN is uniquely dangerous?
(my opinion is that both individuals and trends matter, there are people that changed history, but power of geography/economy/technology is also great - for example, once nuclear weapons were discovered it had some consequences. And no individual can uninvent nuclear weapons.)
Wars can also be decided my random misfortunes. If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.
> If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.
That's actually less true than it might seem. Warmer winters can be worse for highly mechanized armies like the Wehrmacht, really any army but tanks and mud are not friends. That part of the world especially in the early 40s where many of the roads were unpaved turns into a giant sucking mud pit during warmer winters. It's bad enough it's bogged down modern armies miles south in Ukraine when the weather warms up from the winter freezes and the mud season sets in. On top of that they needed a lightning victory because their fuel situation was already pretty bad in 41, part of the reason for going East in the first place was to get oil for the war machine.
A slight change in weather and England could have been invaded by the Spanish Armada.
Also I don't think it's a great pro-Great Man nor anti-Structuralist argument. Structuralist don't believe it's deterministic generally and if history is so down to random chance then how important are the "Great Men"? It's basically a wash for either side imo.
FWIW, I asked Grok and it said that with better weather Germany might have taken Moscow, but they were probably (80%) doomed anyway because of several factors, including Hitler's incompetent military strategy.
If they had attacked in April instead, Grok gives it 50% chance that they defeat the Soviets before the winter and Lend-Lease equipment makes it hopeless.
I know, it's just a word predicting piece of mindless software...
Still, I stick by my main point. The Spanish Armada example is better than mine.
Total side-note, I've actually seen Serbia's basic FU response to Austro-Hungary in Serbia :-)
It's kind of like how every religious founding document has a huge element of "and the sinners/bad people were struck down as they inevitably would be because they did not live by god/he was not on their side" when when describing the origin of whoever is god's chosen people according to that religion.
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.
It was also the first flight in front of a crowd, so pretty relevant to history.
Sources: https://old.fai.org/news/personalities/42650-12-november-190...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/10-milesto...
This isn't one of those cases, like light bulbs, where it can be reasonably debated who was first. The Wrights were in front of the competition by literal miles.
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.
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour-extras...
Merit and ability sit atop of the works of all humanity but without it nothing would be accomplished.
I'm also not saying it's 100% structural or economic just the education tends to highlight individuals instead of fully covering all the others that were just behind the person who's getting the lion's share of the credit historically.
Of course other people are involved - stating the obvious isn't enlightening. Individual merit, insight and achievement should absolutely be celebrated. This whole effort to say we'd be where we are as humans scientifically regardless of individual effort and intellect is shades of cultural revolution and 100% rewriting history.
It's the equivalent of saying individuality isn't needed and it's 100% wrong. Recognize other contributors of course, but don't discount individuals.
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).
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.
AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training convnets on GPU’s in 2009?
OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was only OpenAI training larger and larger language models.
TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman
In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1 person or group did not exist.
Do you happen to still have the homework questions/solutions somewhere ?
At the moment the new ones are locked behind CMU credentials.
I don’t have any of the code for the solutions.
Bicycles do not need precision bearings nor pneumatic tires, as proven by the fact that bicycles predate them by decades. Also radial style ball bearings were invented for bicycles. Bicycles were the catalyst for precision bearings, not the other way around. Similarly pneumatic tires were created for tricycles (long after pedal bicycles were already invented)
Yes we absolutely could have had 2 wheeled transportation centuries earlier. Roads, the actually necessary infrastructure, was long since a thing for carts and wagons.
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).
I take it as given that (a) individual human flourishing is an important and worthy goal, (b) love (seeking the good of others) and hard work are the principal means of attaining that goal, and (c) formal human institutions (like marriage, family, and country) are the best means of organizing the human relationships and activities that fall under [b].
Given (a), (b), and (c), it follows that:
- to promote the health and flourishing of those institutions is to promote human flourishing itself
- thoughtfully managing shared values and expectations of members in those institutions promotes flourishing of the institutions
- love and preference for other members of each institution promotes the health of its members and of the institution itself
I also posit (but don't have the space/time to work out the reasoning) that just as individual people should not live for themselves only, each institution must not exist merely for its own sake, but also for the good of those outside of it; that its own internal health and cohesion is an important prerequisite for being able to effectively benefit the rest of society; and that institutions that exist solely for their own sake with zero outreach are unhealthy.
However, to say that an institution is wrong or unhealthy because members of it love each other more than people outside the institution is to deny that the institution itself is a good thing. We intuitively know that healthy married people love each other more than others, and that healthy family members love each other more than others. In a healthy company, we work for the good of our own company first, not other companies. The same principle should apply to countries. To reduce the principle to a pithy saying: "Put your own [country's] oxygen mask on first."
> National identity is a relatively recent concept
I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Every successful society since ancient history, from local tribes to the great ancient empires to modern countries had (at a minimum) social cohesion, shared values, and a shared identity. Individual members of Visigoth and Viking tribes identified as Visigoths and Vikings and had a shared sense of identity; same with Greeks, Romans, Germans, French, English, Swedish, etc. The United States at its inception and for a long time afterwards was no exception.
This doesn't mean we should be unfriendly and not care about others. Love is not a zero-sum game. Members of families that are affectionate to one another also feel very loving to people outside the family. The healthiest countries in the last 100 years were also some of the best international partners and best places to travel...
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.
Would you say the same of your family?
If a family member were doing bad things, I would still love them and be loyal to them. But I would show that love by confronting them thoughtfully, not rejecting the family entirely. In that sense, our mutual family membership could hopefully become a means of calling them back to their senses, especially if multiple family members are involved in talking to them over a period of time.
> It's like football hooligans fighting over their favorite sports teams.
That take trivializes human institutions in which we are members. These institutions ought to be taken as sacred. When they fall, we fall. (Not so with a sports team losing to another team :)
Plus: if your country goes bad, your best move might be to take your family and get the hell out of there. There are plenty of recent examples.
Yes, some falls were good. The falls of the Nazi Germany, the USSR, East Germany, and Nicolae Ceaușescu were very good, primarily because those regimes oppressed their populations and murdered tens of millions of people. Yet many falls were bad. The fall of Germany to the Nazi party, the falls of Russia and China to communism, and any invasion and subjugation of a free and noble people is a bad thing.
Let me ask you this rhetorically -- would you rather the USA be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, or the US government? Imagine the consequences of each -- I think you'd agree that each is objectively better or worse than others for specific reasons. If such a choice were presented, it would not be morally or practically neutral - it would carry tremendous implications for human flourishing (or suffering).
We ought to consider carefully and not hand-wave historical (or potential future) events that carry such massive consequences.
> if your country goes bad, your best move might be to take your family and get the hell out of there
Agreed, but that's a last resort. Many did so as Germany was falling to the Nazis, and as Russia and China were falling to communism. I have a friend whose parents escaped to Taiwan by holding on to the underside of a boat as it crossed the channel... I wouldn't tell them it wasn't a big deal. Many people who did so lost everything except their immediate family in the process.
So many people couldn't flee, though. And so much that had been built (people, skills, knowledge, families, institutions, relationships, social capital) was lost forever.
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.
I knew there were several people working on the same thing as Newton at the exact same time. I didn't know the exact dates and their names.
What would you do, Google it all? Good choice.
Why would you be a programmer at all if you're gonna let AI do the hard work?
Why even use a keyboard, that's for people that really don't know how to write themselves.
Seriously though, it’s a bit of an amusing coincidence that the Leibniz biscuit and the fig Newton were both independently invented in 1891 (at least according to Wikipedia).
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 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]
János Bolyai, not Bolshai. And certainly in the 1820s-1830s he investigated the Euclidean parallel postulate, arriving at a hyperbolic geometry in which it does not hold true (i.e., initially close parallel lines diverge), and eventually studying geometries which take no position on the parallel postulate. Lobachevsky also independently arrived at a hyperbolic geometry, and continued develop a substitute postulate for the parallel postulate.
However, all of the above is several long steps before developing differential geometry with its inner products encoding angles and distances on the tangent spaces at each point on an arbitrarily curved smooth manifold of higher dimensions, and an even longer one from the pseudo-Riemannian manifold of 3+1d General Relativity. Although many hands contributed to the positive inner product -> non-degenerate inner product, the reason anyone was doing that was because of Einstein's work on gravitation (in turn provoked in part by Poincaré's 1905 argument about Lorentz-invariance of the wave equation for gravitation, in the spirit of Special Relativity).
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.
In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse, however, did not know of Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[11]: 149 for his first computer Z1, which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938.this is the one factor that makes me question whether it should be considered first.. conditional branching is pretty significant to what we consider a computer. better informed people than myself have come up with a variety of takes on this, i read all that i see because i find Zuse fascinating but i still am not sure if its fair to call one system or the other "first".
the advent of computing podcast has some interesting well researched episodes, scroll down a little to 145 and 146: https://adventofcomputing.com/
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.
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.
Correct. The electric bulb had at least 12 inventors and radio communication at lest 3 inventors.
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.
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.
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 )
The idea of making an "airplane", with fixed wings and with screw propellers, had been widespread for most of the second half of the 19th century, and it had been discussed in countless publications and in "heavier-than-air" flight clubs.
However, before the Wright brothers, nobody had succeeded to build such an airplane that actually worked, the main reason being the lack of an appropriate system of aircraft controls, like that conceived by the Wright brothers.
The patent obtained by the Wright brothers, is formulated very well and of course it does not claim to have invented any new kind of flying machine, but it claims certain new and useful improvements in flying machines of the airplane kind (most of which refer to the aircraft control surfaces).
It wouldn't be appropriate to say "they were responsible for 100% of the technological development and research that led to this machine" but if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.
An airplane without good aircraft controls could start to fly without problems, but it would normally crash sooner or later, either due to flight instabilities or because it had to eventually land somewhere.
You come and adjust them. Did you just invent the bike? Or did you build upon my previous invention(s) and perfected it, making us both partial inventors?
People invent things. But "airplane" turned out to be much more than one thing. Not all of them were invented by Curtiss (a local favorite), or by Santos-Dumont, or by Lilienthal, Caproni, the Wrights, or whoever.
It's also fair to debate what qualifies as an airplane. If I were to list criteria, I would include two that the first Wright Flyer did not demonstrate: the ability to take off from level ground under its own power, and sufficient maneuverability to return to and land at the point of departure.
Their experiments with it ended when a gust flipped it on the ground and broke it beyond repair.
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.
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.
In the US the story is that because Soviet nukes were more crude than the US versions, which made them heavier and bulkier so the Soviets had to build their rockets bigger to have enough range. When the focus shifted to putting a man in orbit having a larger rocket to start with was an advantage and allowed the Soviets to achieve a number of firsts.
I do agree that declaring the race suddenly over with a man on the moon was a case of taking the ball and going home.
See, I would characterize this differently-- after the US reached the Moon, Russia pretty much gave up-- gave up on the N1, Zond, etc.
I guess that depends on what you define as the bounds of the space race. If we go to the fall of the Soviet Union, yea, I completely agree with your last statement. After we landed on the moon, we did start getting serious about probes and had a bunch of wins there with voyager and such.
I was talking about post-1970 stagnation.
Russia basically scaled everything waaaay back post 1970. You have Venera as a significant first/win, parity for a little while on Mars, and then the US unrivaled in the outer solar system.
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.
In the end the big winner of the Space Race was humanity, in the massive scientific leap forward that it created.
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
)
> 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."
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.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)
The Wright brothers famously used data collected by Otto Lilienthal on glide slopes for unpowered gliders. They reproduced that data with their own gliders.
Wilbur Wright once wrote, "Lilienthal was without question the greatest of the precursors, and the world owes to him a great debt."
But Lilienthal died in an accident before adding the key feature of power, necessary to achieve powered flight.
The Wright Brothers worked on control surfaces for a while, then turned to power. They notably didn't invent the internal combustion engine, nor did they invent or build theirs. They contracted out the work, with specifications.
The site at Kitty Hawk is favorable because of a slope and prevailing wind (it's an awesome place to visit). But the Wright Flyer II flew powered flight in Ohio in 1904. And then the Flyer III flew in 1905, again in Ohio. They again returned to Kitty Hawk in 1905, got rid of the catapault, and worked to start securing military contracts.
Europe, particularly France had a very active scene in flight research. When the Wright brothers' achievment made it to France in 1906, it was publicly ridiculed, no doubt creating the information environment for European sponsored researches to make claims.
The Wrights were not the first to fly, but they were the first in a collection of qualifications
- powered
- controlled
- heavier than air
- sustained
- flight
The technical base that enabled them also existed elsewhere, including Europe. A lighter, more powerful engine, better control surfaces, and a better design could easily surpass their design, and those technologies were improving rapidly. It's clear Santos-Dumont was an accomplished aeronautist, but was a couple years late hitting the qualifications the Wrights had already achieved and in some ways didn't achieve a few of them -- he notably used a hybrid lighter than air system to achieve takeoff in 1906. Insufficient to achieve the award he was shooting for. He later achieved it, with a wholly unique design, which is still remarkable.
If the Wright brothers had crashed and died during their development, the world would have still had flight in the end.
No, they designed the engine and hired a machinist (Charles Taylor) to make it.
The funny thing is that today the separation of aircraft and engine design persists.
The Wrights contacted multiple engine makers who all refused the job.
I think that is overly reductive. Regardless of if someone is paid for a thing, the creation is still theirs.
I have been paid to solve problems, but the solution was my creation.
This in a new term to me. I believe it means Size, Weight, and Power. Specifically as an optimization problem. The modern version includes cost as well which was probably less of a concern with the Wright Flyer.
Just take a look at the L'Aerophile gazette that started on the late 1800s. Similarly to computers, it's like reading the early editions of Byte magazine. There was a profuse number of people and small businesses from all over the world looking for collaboration with different goals in mind, selling their products and exchanging, stealing and improving on ideas of each other:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344143803/date https://archive.org/details/larophile08besa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...
[1] Embraer:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...
Polish mathematicians.
Depends on who you want to credit I suppose. Such huge tasks are usually accomplished in bits by many people.
That Polish mathematicians broke the codes, and shared this information with the British, is taught in the UK.
My understanding (from school in England) is the British codebreakers' contribution was to scale up the scale of the codebreaking, by using lots of machines and their own mathematical innovations.
Not coincidentally, Langley was the secretary of the Smithsonian, and in addition, his claims were promoted by Glenn Curtiss in his attempts to overthrow the Wright patents. As the dispute heated up, the Wrights loaned the flyer to the London Science Museum, where it remained until after Orville's death.
I think it's similar to the lightbulb. The availability of certain other technologies allowed for an explosion in invention leading to many simultaneous "discoveries" of the same basic inventions. In the US it seems we prioritize the documentation through the patent system to ascribe credit
Thanks to a mix of chauvinism and great-man-theory, we often forget that science is an international, collective and incremental effort.
Some argue that the Wright's flights don't count because they used a "rail" (long piece of wood acting as a runway, because runways did not then exist) or used a catapult. Both of these arguments are bullshit, the catapult argument in particular because their first flights at Kitty Hawk didn't use a catapult.
Not only that, but they were the first to realize that the tables of lift published by whatshisname the French guy were bogus. They built a wind tunnel so that they could make their own measurements of lift and drag. Weirdly, the wind tunnel had been invented ~50 years earlier! Apparently most of the Europeans who were playing with gliders that whole time didn’t even know about wind tunnels or they might have thought to put two and two together.
> On 23 October, Santos-Dumont presented himself at Bagatelle with the Oiseau de Proie II, a modification of the original model. The plane had been varnished to reduce the porosity of the fabric and increase lift. The rear wheel had been removed. In the morning he limited himself to manoeuvring the aircraft across the field, until the propeller shaft broke. It was repaired in the afternoon, and the plane was moved into position for an official attempt. An expectant crowd was present. At 4:45 pm, Santos-Dumont started the engine.[107] The plane lifted off and flew for 60 metres,[26]: 18 without taking advantage of headwinds, ramps, catapults, slopes, or other devices. The flight had taken place solely by the aircraft's own means, and Europeans at the time believed it was the first such achievement.
As I said in another comment, the Wright Brothers were pretty secretive about their works and it wasn't until 1908 that people in Europe knew about them.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj...
Also, by this photo, that propeller seems to be working: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Santos_-_Nov12_1906.jpg
BTW WaPo, neither the Wrights or Santos-Dumont "invented" the airplane. As with so many of these things there were many contributors. Otto Lillienthal, who the Wrights credited as an inspiration (and who as the first plane crash fatality?) had already flow many times. Even Da Vinci explored the idea.
The real insight of the Wright Brothers was to focus on stability and control. Lilienthal got this - he flew about 2,000 glider flights, before dying in a crash before he got to power. Langley (NASA Langley is named after him) was trying for inherently stable aircraft rather than controllable ones. That's quite possible, but add too much stability and you can't maneuver much.
Somebody was going to succeed at this by the early 1900s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Landsberg#Discovery_of...
Also watch enthusiasts - one of Cartier (who invented the pilots watch) models is the Santos Dumont.
IMHO arguing about who was the first it's good to keep in mind that: 1. inventions don't happen in a vacuum - they rely on the work of predecessors 2. some inventions/discoveries are mande by different people/teams independently around the same time.
Then I went home and watched a documentary explaining all the stuff that happened after their success at Kittyhawk. Pretty sad that they took the patent/scarcity approach and stopped innovating. It was a cautionary tale to me to never let your foot off the gas once you’ve found something that works.
Revisionist History like this fascinates me.
It is very well documented, with written texts, witnesses and even a handful of photographs that the Wright brothers had functional manned aircraft 3 years prior in 1903...
Yet I've personally seen Romanian postal stamps that credit Vuia with "the first flight" for him managing to jump just 11m (36 ft) in a plane.
The first actual flight, with the aeroplane taking off and flying instead of a human jumping off a cliff/dune, was Vuia's.
You cherry picked the wrong quote, read the entire articles.
The US has claimed much more for much less in the past don't @ me.
Have a look at the German aviation pioneer "Gustav Weißkopf" aka "Gustave Whitehead":
Let's also discount all rocket launches near the equator, as this is also cheating.
How many legs does a dog have if I call it's tail a leg?
> Curtiss went to work, strengthening the structure, adding controls, reshaping it aerodynamically, relocating the center of gravity -- in short, making it airworthy. In 1914 he flew it for 150 feet, and then he went back and replaced the old motor as well. On the basis of Curtiss's reconstruction, the Smithsonian honored Langley for having built the first successful flying machine.[...] In 1942 the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Abbot, finally authorized publication of an article that clearly showed the Langley reconstruction was rigged.
Nitpick (see pedantic and mostly irrelevant replies to the excellent top comment.
Who cares, anyway? Whatabout all the other things that have ever happened? (see 2nd comment, 3rd comment)
More nitpicking, 4th comment
Top comment, and further down, the comments and discussion are quite good. I do wonder about how large an impact a targeted, small amount of astroturfing can accomplish. just boost/inject some cynicism and negativity into the top 2-4 comments, nothing too obvious. Just enough to poison the well a bit.