The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil
516 comments
·March 22, 2025WalterBright
AceyMan
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.
silisili
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!
WalterBright
The Wrights were motivated by money. They wanted to get rich off of licensing their technology.
They turned out to be fantastic engineers, but not so good at making money.
zZorgz
They also did not attend university nor received high school diplomas. They were self driven a lot.
ant6n
We have no problem with drive and interest, but I wish we had half the funding of the scammers!
cookiengineer
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.
moralestapia
Oh man, I love the A12 and its design is just amazing. It's the perfect aircraft 10/10.
WalterBright
The 1903 Flyer did have one defect - it was unstable in pitch. It required an active hand on the pitch control.
seabass-labrax
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.
kwertyoowiyop
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.
jshmrsn
This is true again for the most advanced fighter aircraft, except the active hand is now a computer.
connicpu
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.
WalterBright
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.
x3n0ph3n3
Not quite. The propeller and control surface configuration is now reversed from what was used on the original Flyer.
carabiner
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.
WalterBright
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.
hugs
"...someone else in the world would have done it within 10 years." That is arguably true of every invention ever invented.
robocat
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".
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).
WalterBright
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.
TeMPOraL
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.
peterashford
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.
db48x
Close. The 1901 glider used a rail and took off down hill. Their Flyer used skids and could take off from level ground even on sand.
andikleen2
> 4. First design that used a wind tunnel to get an efficient wing shape
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.
WalterBright
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.
andikleen2
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.
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."
bee_rider
> 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.
WalterBright
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.
anderber
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
kwertyoowiyop
Ive read that the Wright propeller is 80% as efficient as modern light-aircraft propellers. What an amazing achievement.
wtallis
"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.
kragen
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.
WalterBright
I don't think 6 and 7 were done by Dumont before 1903. Insufficient documentary information is available, like a detailed description of the design.
P4u1
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.
ninjagoo
These days, gliders/sailplanes are commonly launched using winches or tow planes.
Motor gliders self-launch.
maxlybbert
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.
lupusreal
When you catapult a plane that can't fly, it still can't fly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langley_Aerodrome#/media/File:...
The Wright flyer could and frequently did do circles around the field for several minutes after being catapulted. It was no glider.
tshaddox
Or into an intense headwind.
brudgers
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.
WalterBright
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.
brudgers
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.
So thanks.
[1] https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/wright-brothers-fl...
hathawsh
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.
WalterBright
See "The Wright Brothers as Engineers" by Quentin Wald
https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-E...
DistractionRect
You can actually formally do just that, HN maintains a highlights list which you can email them nominations for:
MostlyStable
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.
dj_gitmo
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
avmich
Really? :(
lcfcjs6
[flagged]
andrewflnr
Humans sometimes write punchy lists, too, especially when they're trying to prove a point. Where do you think the LLMs learned it?
WalterBright
Stylometry has me pegged with a predictable style that predates AI.
alwa
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…
QuantumGood
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.
idoubtit
The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless, because the largest part of the invention is collective. Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors.
Without the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont, aviation might have been created a few years later, but, overall, the consequence would have been small.
rtkwe
It's a big deficiency in the way history is taught, at least here in the US, it's mostly taught as Guy/Group X did Y in year ZZZZ and leaves out a lot of the context that shows how many people were often doing similar things before or simultaneously. It leads a lot of people to buy into the Great Man of History view point when there's rarely singular figures that the the principal cause, often they're just the one who won.
emursebrian
We had a history teacher in high school who noted that. He always tried to cover the factors that led up to an event happening. I always appreciated that.
Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".
kccqzy
My history teacher in middle school really liked to tell us the idea of "historical determinism" whenever an individual appeared to have changed the course of history. Of course that theory doesn't place enough emphasis on individual effort or even their free will. But I guess I appreciated the alternate viewpoint.
dwighttk
You just lay down a foundation and keep putting layers on top of that…
evilduck
I think there's a wide variety of ways this gets taught (in the US at least).
But if you go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where the Wright Flyer is currently on display, maybe a third of the room's displays document the achievements of the wide array of pioneers of flight besides the Wright Brothers, followed by maybe another third of the room documenting the fast followers who competed with the Wright Brothers (and many of their tragic deaths).
rtkwe
It's not impossible to find of course, it's not like it's being suppressed, but if you just go through high school, and a lot of colleges depending on their general education requirements, your main history education will be very Great Person oriented.
boringg
To discount individual achievement is such a disservice to humanity. There is absolutely an environmental benefit but i take issue with the totally BS if they didn't do it someone else would on all things is such a knee cap to individual merit and ability.
Merit and ability sit atop of the works of all humanity but without it nothing would be accomplished.
rtkwe
It's not about wiping out individual achievements it's just about recognizing that no one does it alone and that some ideas were just ready to explode. Radio, Calculus, the Steam Engine, etc all had simultaneous inventions in many areas or get commonly attributed to one particular person are actually just built up to a point they can be successful through the work of dozens of people.
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.
ghaff
I'd be very surprised if it were unique to the US although there's probably some cultural element. There is a tendency to ascribe invention to an individual even if the real answer is an individual's lab/team or really a more complex story. E.g. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine although he came up with an innovation that made it significantly more efficient. Look at almost any significant invention and its history is... complicated. But ask who invented something and "complicated" isn't a very satisfactory answer.
KoolKat23
Fits the whole pull yourself up by the bootstraps mindset. I can imagine income inequality would be less disparate if people realized how much society actually contributes.
preciousoo
FWIW when I was an aerospace major, one of the first lessons in “fundamentals of flight” as the class was named, was about the race to flight that was heating up around the time of the Wright brothers. But this was in an aerospace class, so I guess it’s less relevant. Never heard about the Brazilian guys though
brabel
Interesting, given Dumont performed "the first officially observed flight in Europe that was longer than 25m was performed in Paris (FRA)" in 1906.
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...
derekp7
Also is a deficiency in patents. Instead of giving a temporary monopoly on a genuine original idea and solution, it becomes a land rush to who can get to a newly obvious idea the fastest.
neuroelectron
That's not how I remember learning it in grade school. There was a whole chapter on people trying and failing to achieve flight and many close calls. Then there was yet more history about other groups who achieved it after the Wright Bros.
1980phipsi
I agree that simultaneous invention is an important concept, but I view it separately from Great Man Theory of History. GMTH is invariably trying to capture the idea that when you have a person who has a lot power, then their successes or failures can have a large impact on the rest of society. I don't dispute that they can be part of the zeitgeist of forces that are driving society, but sometimes what one person in power says matters a lot. I think it probably matters less for scientific pursuits where a lot of people are thinking about something and one person happens to be the person who got there first (not that this doesn't deserve praise either).
Aurornis
> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless,
I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative.
Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together.
Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together.
Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected.
I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.
akie
Who created the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer? And why does everyone think it's an American, 4 years later?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
History is not a collection of objective records.
necovek
Even that Wikipedia page has this snippet:
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.hvs
Because every computer record has a host of qualifiers on it (like "programmable", "fully automatic").
spogbiper
"The Z3 was demonstrated in 1998 to be, in principle, Turing-complete. However, because it lacked conditional branching, the Z3 only meets this definition by speculatively computing all possible outcomes of a calculation."
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/
ChrisMarshallNY
I believe that invention was a bit controversial, for some reason...
jillesvangurp
I saw the replica of this in Berlin in the museum of technology a few months ago. Worth visiting if you are in town.
cpach
I guess that’s why the saying is that “history is written by the victors”.
mritchie712
This was a surprising one for me:
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.
Henchman21
The show “Connections” with James Burke does a wonderful job of highlighting these sorts of overlapping of ideas and people and their collective results. Old, but well worth a watch!
btilly
We still mostly use Leibniz' dy/dx notation. Newton's fluxions and y-dot (a dot over the y) notation are largely forgotten.
The Hooke debate gave us a great quote from Newton. "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Hooke was a dwarf...)
hydrogen7800
~20 years ago in school, I encountered dy/dx and y-dot with about equal frequency (and maybe y' & f'(x)) in engineering and calculus courses. Engineering favored the dots.
grokys
At least Leibniz is still famous for the biscuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz-Keks
zoky
The fig Newton was invented first though.
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).
glitcher
I'm reading "The Secret Lives of Numbers" which has some fascinating deep dives into lesser taught math history (at least in western culture), including the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in India where significant contributions to calculus were made in the 1500's well before Newton and Leibniz!
christina97
Thanks ChatGPT.
FergusArgyll
When will people realize that pasting markdown is a dead giveaway?
plastic3169
My favorite is that luggage with wheels was invented in 1972. The tech was there already. We just waited for somebody to invent it.
dmbche
Mine is how we have evidence of wheels being used on children's toys in some south american cultures but not for transportation - they fully discovered everything to create wheeled transportation, but it's suspected that living on hilly terrain made it much less advantageous and it was not adopted.
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."
shawabawa3
i guess the real invention for wheeled transportation is not wheels, but (flat) roads
rtkwe
Another potential reason it was never scaled up to carts is they didn't have access to a great draft animal candidate. Without that early carts are a lot less useful. The largest options were llamas or alpacas which are still fairly small and weak as draft animals go. The nearest option would have been buffalo in North America but they don't have great base temperaments for domesticating and they're not geographically relevant to South America even if they were.
aqme28
Actually, this makes me think the opposite. This is a great example actually.
Polyurethane wheels weren't introduced to skateboarding until 1971. It took off in popularity due to this because the previous wheels were made of clay and were basically terrible.
I don't know the history of luggage wheels, but it sounds like it was waiting for the invention of the polyurethane wheel.
JackFr
People credit Dick Fosbury for inventing the modern high jump approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop but it was the switch from jumping onto foam pads rather than into a pile of sawdust and sand that made it possible.
SilasX
This. What held up wheeled luggage was the difficulty of having small, reliable wheels that could bear a lot of weight. You could have big wheels, but that would be impractical here, though not for chariots, wheelbarrows, pushcarts, or rickshaws ... which did exist in antiquity.
mixmastamyk
I remember metal skates (steel perhaps) in the early seventies.
msh
I guess this kind of invention also depends on a few things outside what is technically possible:
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.
ch4s3
More importantly, prior to airline deregulation in the 1970s only the wealthy and business travelers were flying and someone else carried their bags for them. It is the middle class traveler who lugs their own bags.
arrowsmith
My favourite is that humanity had fire, baskets, ropes and silk by 3500 BCE, but it took thousands of years before anyone combined them into a hot air balloon.
We could have been flying in the neolithic period.
pas
did people had that much usable silk in one place back then?
TeMPOraL
Did it wait for someone to invent it, or for it to make economical sense to put this tech in that particular application?
Zaiberia
You can’t little wheely luggage until it’s little wheely luggage time?
ghaff
I had a wheeled suitcase in probably the late 70s--which was an unstable wheeled traditional suitcase. (i.e. narrow configuration with a high center of gravity.)
Not sure why it took a while for manufacturers to reimagine to a more stable orientation.
There was some parallel technical innovation--such as the wheels and bearings for rollerblades--that was going on during the 80s.
mont_tag
Perhaps the need was less pressing when airports were smaller and fewer people traveled.
nkozyra
I agree, which is why the Wright Brothers less "invented flight" than "had the first sustained engine-powered flight." A lot of historical documents describe it similarly to the latter, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
I think there's a loose threshold for when something is "viable," and that becomes the genesis of invention. Even in the Wright Brothers' case, the first flight was viable only in demonstration, there was no practical application for a few generations of aircraft.
And as this article highlights, US hegemony kind of ruled via the "winners write history" theory. Which is why some people still say Edison invented the light bulb.
dennis_jeeves2
>Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors.
Correct. The electric bulb had at least 12 inventors and radio communication at lest 3 inventors.
null
intalentive
Saying “who invented this?” is how the collective celebrates, strengthens and participates in its own tradition. In every field the neophyte meets illustrious predecessors who paved the way.
adev_
The fact of who was first honestly does not matter: they were all amazing pioneers.
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.
clan
Santos Dumont had close competition by Jacob Ellehammer[1] who is probably only (mostly) known locally.
But truly pioneers: Building planes, helicopters and cars totally from scratch.
upofadown
Well, the Wright brothers invented an aeroplane. Their most important contribution was the use of wing warping to allow the control of roll. Wing warping turned out to be less practical than the approach still used today: the aileron. A patent owned by the Wright's on wing warping caused a lot of pointless legal conflict and arguably slowed down the pace of innovation with respect to the problem[1].
TeMPOraL
I"m starting to wonder when, if ever, patents did not hinder technological advancement on the net.
jeroenhd
Various improvements to machinery during the industrial revolution were only possible with vast amounts of investment upfront, and the patent system made that possible. You're not going to be building a factory powering steam engine at home, even if you've found a method that will increase its efficiency by a significant margin.
Of course, patents are only respected when a country is in the lead. Early America was notorious for espionage and strategically ignoring patents to bolster its own economy, and China doesn't really care about what patents you may have when one of their companies is competing with you.
hn_throwaway_99
Related, a good article on how a contributing factor to the founding of Hollywood as the world's movie capital was due to Thomas Edison's stranglehold on patents: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-th...
kube-system
When the development of the innovation requires a bunch of up-front capital.
ycombinatornews
Or to expand this a bit more - they learned and documented how to have controlled flight. They were the first ones to have flights measured in hours. Big difference from just a one off flight.
(there is a great book about this https://share.libbyapp.com/title/1815407 )
aap_
As a german i hadn't heard of the wright brothers until my 20s. Otto Lilienthal is the name associated with the invention of airplanes here.
stavros
Well, I wasn't convinced by the Brazilians' argument that catapults don't count, but then Otto Lilienthal's flights should also count. Either you want completely unaided flight, and Dumont did it first, or you don't, and Lilienthal's flights are the first.
adrian_b
Dumont did it first in the sense that he achieved a flight long enough, i.e. over 100 meter, in order to win the prize for such a flight that had been instituted a couple of years earlier.
A half of year before Santos Dumont, also in Paris, there had been other flight attempts that had succeeded to take off completely unaided, by rolling on wheels (by Traian Vuia), but the achieved lengths of sustained flight had been much shorter, too short to qualify for any prize.
So while the achievements of Santos Dumont are very commendable, the word "invention" is not really appropriate for them, because all he had done was to do better some of the things already done by others in their attempts to win the French flight prizes.
The Wright brothers have started from Otto Lilienthal's work. While their improvements have been extremely important, their work has also not started from zero, but it had built upon the work of the predecessors.
In the history of inventions, it is typically impossible to say that something has really begun with some inventor. Instead of that, the right way is to point to each inventor and show what they have done better than what existed before them.
munchler
Lilienthal flew with gliders. The Wright brothers claim the first powered flight (i.e. an airplane).
adrian_b
The Wright brothers have invented many components of an airplane, which made powered flight possible, but it seems inappropriate to say that they have invented an "airplane".
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).
VMG
The same is true to some extent for cars (Ford/Benz). LLMs will even answer differently depending on the language the question is asked.
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.
ominous_prime
The only source that will respond Ford invented the car is a person who has no idea and is simply guessing the first name comes to mind. It can't really even be contested since Benz's and Ford's inventions are decades apart.
dylan604
I've never been taught that Ford invented the car, but instead Ford invented the mass production of cars. Not really sure where "Ford invented car" comes from
readingnews
I have not actually heard that argument. It has always been noted that Benz invented the car, and Ford invented the assembly line, for cars.
devilbunny
Yeah, as an American I never was taught that Ford invented cars. He invented cheap cars.
UncleSlacky
Oldsmobile invented the assembly line for cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_E._Olds#Assembly_line
mr_toad
He was the first to mass produce cars. But given that cars and mass production already existed it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to mass produce cars.
thereddaikon
Nobody claims Ford invented the car. Its undisputed in the mainstream that Karl Benz did. What Ford achieved was making it into a viable mass market product. Ford's inventions had less to do with the car itself and more with the process of mass production. Ford's system was incredibly influential and very wide reaching. But the car was very much invented and known before he did that.
mulmen
Exactly. Ford didn't actually invent anything. Kinda like Jobs and Woz didn't invent the IC or CPU or even PC. Ford was in tune with the innovations of the time and composed them in a novel and appealing way. His success came from his skilled execution and were more financial and social than technical in nature. Ford marketed cars to the middle class, and paid his employees well enough to buy the products they built.
figomore
About Radio here in Brazil there is other one: Roberto Landell de Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
giancarlostoro
Thats actually more interesting that LLMs answer based on language questions are asked, I never thought to test that. It would be nice if we got to a point where you train an LLM to genuinely figure out these nuances and fix its own model.
Sam6late
Google, I suspect, would do the same, if you were in Texas coffee's origin would not get you the result that mentions Yemen, Ethiopia would be the first result. This is how I won a $100 bet with a Texan who insisted that google gave him Ethiopia. The trouble is, we were in the Middle East when asking google for the bet.
sofixa
What? Even Ford Motor Company don't seem to claim that Ford made the first car. His Quadricycle was first ran in 1896, Benz's is from 1885...
bane
If it makes you feel better, in the U.S. we learn that the Wright brothers used Lilienthal's glider data extensively in the R&D phases of their work. He managed to gather a lot of data on gliders and glide slopes which informed the brothers' earlier work. Their achievement summits their peers only in qualifications, the first:
- powered
- controlled
- heavier than air
- sustained
- flight
WalterBright
The Wrights did use Lilienthal's data for their earlier gliders, but it turned out to be off by a factor of 2. That is why the Wrights built a wind tunnel to determine the correct values.
ricksunny
Lol - when I studied aerospace in France the hagiography literature was all about Louis Breguet and Louis Bleriot. I don't recall mention (i.e. in general conversation, offhand references in non-formal literature, or on posters, etc.) about the Wright brothers.
Oddly I don't recall much mention of Alberto Santos-Dumont either so, go figure.
brolumir
This reminds me of a somewhat related topic - who won the space race? Growing up in Soviet Union, we were taught that it was the USSR - when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Then I came to the US, and was taught that it was the US, when Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon.
Deukhoofd
No-one ever really set the goalpost of the Space Race, so it can be whichever you want. I personally like to consider the Apollo–Soyuz mission as the true finish of the space race, where the two nations docked their spacecraft together, and an astronaut and a cosmonaut shook hands in space.
In the end the big winner of the Space Race was humanity, in the massive scientific leap forward that it created.
boringg
Best answer possible - too bad they couldn't align better in the long run (ie for humanity).
YeGoblynQueenne
Thanks.
jeroenhd
I think it's pretty obvious in hindsight that the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here. The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets. Putting a man on the moon showed that America was vastly more capable on a technical level, but that wasn't really the point of the space race.
It's also why governments are carefully watching North Korea's space program, even if they'll never be able to put a man on the moon. Their ability to launch a sattelite into orbit makes them a threat, whether or not they can make a moon lander has little real value beyond vanity.
mlyle
> The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets.
The US and the Soviets had operational ICBMs at pretty much the same time-- dueling milestones from 1957 to 1959.
Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs.
Then the US caught up and surpassed them.
Then both stagnated; Russia did a slightly better job in choosing priorities for human spaceflight; the US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight.
jandrese
> Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs.
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.
tcmart14
Wouldn't the 'US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight' depend on when you want to plant the flag that the space race ended? If we go with what in the US we define as a man on the moon, the Soviets I believe were putting probes all over the place. The soviets were landing probes first on bodies in the 60s. While the US focused on the moon.
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.
shortrounddev2
From what I understand the US outnumbered the soviets in sheer number of missiles though. Early 1960s politicians fearmongered about soviet missile capacity in order to justify a huge expansion in military capabilities while the soviets lagged behind in raw numbers.
crazygringo
> the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here
On the one hand, yes absolutely.
On the other hand -- which is more exciting? The "space race" of getting the first man in space and back, or the "moon race" of getting the first man on the moon and back?
I think it's fair to say the "moon race" was a far greater event in human history, to set foot on another world. Yes, the US shifted the goalposts... but at the same time the new goalposts seem like the more momentous event in human history. Think of how people across the world tuned in for live TV footage of the moon landing.
zanderwohl
That's not really the full story. The US didn't come up with the moon goal. It was the Soviets' plan already, which is why JFK publicly announced it in a speech: to force them into a public prestige battle. The Soviets had the habit of repeated private failure. If they achieved something, they'd announce it afterwards; if they failed, they kept quiet. The US broadcast launches on TV and pre-announced goals, which was a major propaganda effort and much more effective than post-flight releases.
motus2
Growing in the Soviet Union, you should also remember the story that the airplane was invented by Mozhaysky, radio by Popov, lightbulb by Ladygin, and so on. No one in the US disputes who the first man in space was - the narrative rather highlights the US achievements. The soviets (and Russia) take it to the next level. It took me a while to understand why none of my colleagues have ever heard of Ostrogradskiy and Kotelnikov theorems
esafak
Kotelnikov is known to the Wikipedia generation, since he's mentioned in the sampling theorem article.
wil421
It was the race that moon the US one. The USSR was the first into space both with a spacecraft orbiting and living beings.
Maybe people interpret what they learned differently but I don’t think they were taught the US won the space race. Of course the goalposts will be moved to claim the glory.
I wasn’t taught that it was Yuri who won but rather Sputnik.
nitwit005
I grew up in the US. If you just make a list of space "firsts", the USSR was first at just about everything important.
It's quite obvious how embarrassed the US was at the whole thing.
lenerdenator
I like to think of it as a contest of one-upmanship.
Eventually the US did something the Soviets could not in the most difficult category of space exploration, which is manned spaceflight. If they'd gotten their manned lunar program done, they would have kept the Space Race going, and the US would have had to find another first. But they didn't.
FloorEgg
When you take a non-zero-sum game and insist it's zero sum, you get subjective winners and losers.
outside1234
If wasn't for all of the nukes involved behind the scenes, I'd say we all won.
aleph_minus_one
If you live in Germany, the Wright brothers may have "invented" the airplane, but Hans Grade was the person who made the airplane practically usable: :-)
> 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
)
Kon-Peki
> and before, Otto Lilienthal invented the glider, i.e. he made the idea of heavier-than-air aircraft a reality
The Wright brothers were very aware of Lilienthal and his contributions.
Wilbur Wright, speaking to the Society of Western Engineers in Chicago, September 1901:
> The difficulties which obstruct the pathway to success in flying-machine construction are of three general classes: (1) Those which relate to the construction of the sustaining wings; (2) those which relate to the generation and application of the power required to drive the machine through the air; (3) those relating to the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight. Of these difficulties two are already to a certain extent solved.
> This inability to balance and steer still confronts students of the flying problem, although nearly eight years have passed. When this one feature has been worked out, the age of flying machines will have arrived, for all other difficulties are of minor importance.
> Herr Otto Lilienthal seems to have been the first man who really comprehended that balancing was the first instead of the last of the great problems in connection with human flight. He began where others left off, and thus saved the many thousands of dollars that it had theretofore been customary to spend in building and fitting expensive engines to machines which were uncontrollable when tried. He built a pair of wings of a size suitable to sustain his own weight, and made use of gravity as his motor.
> Lilienthal not only thought, but acted; and in so doing probably made the greatest contribution to the solution of the flying problem that has ever been made by any one man. He demonstrated the feasibility of actual practice in the air, without which success is impossible. Herr Lilienthal was followed by Mr. Pilcher, a young English engineer, and by Mr. Chanute, a distinguished member of the society I now address. A few others have built gliding machines, but nearly all that is of real value is due to the experiments conducted under the direction of the three men just mentioned.
> We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five hours’ practice, spread out; in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts.
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.
glxxyz
My parents used to take me to Stanford Hall occasionally where there was an exhibit about Percy Pilcher, I suppose it was free to get in. I always found looking up at the waxwork's face slightly disturbing: https://stanfordhall.co.uk/family-history/the-percy-pilcher-...
tdullien
And Konrad Zuse invented the computer.
aleph_minus_one
And the computer mouse was not invented by Douglas Engelbart at Xerox PARC, but by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken:
> 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."
walrus01
And if you ask a French person you'll get an answer that no, it was the Bleriot monoplane of 1907 and the developments that followed from it...
fermigier
If you're French, it's Clément Ader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader
317070
Or the Montgolfier brothers! That was the first time humans went up in the air.
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)
bane
The Wright brothers stood on the shoulders of their peers, in an age of focus on flight similar to today's focus on LLM-based AI systems. Lots of money and time were put into achieving flight, and lots of people achieved some version of it.
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.
jshier
The Wrights actually found that Lilienthal's glider data, especially the specifics about airfoil design, was terribly inaccurate (the closer they got to replicating his designs, the worse their gliders performed). It was only after they built a wind tunnel and used it to validate the performance of various airfoil shapes that they could stabilize their gliders enough to think about making them powered. In many ways, the Wright's greatest advancement was abandoning the established knowledge of the field, including Lilienthal's, and validating their design experimentally from base principles.
mannykannot
When Wilbur Wright first demonstrated his airplane (a Model A somewhat modified while repairing the damage caused in shipping) in Le Mans, it was immediately apparent to the mostly enthusiastic crowd that this was the first fully controlled flight any of them had seen - a tight two-mile circuit with a controlled landing near the launch point. Many of those present would have been well acquainted with what Santos-Dumont and other pioneers had previously achieved.
WalterBright
> They contracted out the work, with specifications.
No, they designed the engine and hired a machinist (Charles Taylor) to make it.
bane
I'm happy to be corrected, but my recollection was that they provided some specifications, what we would call SWaP today, and some sketches to support, and Taylor designed, built, and tested the engine.
The funny thing is that today the separation of aircraft and engine design persists.
WalterBright
I'm sure Taylor contributed to the design. But Taylor was hired to do it as an employee.
The Wrights contacted multiple engine makers who all refused the job.
mulmen
> what we would call SWaP today
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.
pjbk
Like most human endeavors where a technology is coming of age, there was a full aviation industry of hobbyists and nascent entrepreneurs. Most of them were little known by outsiders and on occasion some of them were put in the public spotlight because they had an interesting success or a whimsical failure.
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
jonny_eh
This farmer in New Zealand also apparently invented powered flight first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
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.