(At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight 515
Rogue-Lion.com writes "Take a time out to remember the accomplishments of two bicycle shop owners who changed the world immeasurably, 100 years ago today. The Telegraph is running a story about a recreation of the Wright's (and world's) first heavier-than-air powered flight. President Bush will be in attendance at the event." Setting aside even more exotic theories, rod writes with an alternative point of view: namely, that man's first flight took place in New Zealand, on March 31, 1902. "I admire the U.S.A and the Wright brothers,but there are facts to consider today, 17/12/03, on the centenary of Kitty Hawk." Update: 12/17 13:44 GMT by T : Or was it a Brazillian invention? (Thanks,
Anderson Silva.)
IMAX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another one (Score:5, Informative)
The main accomplishments of the wright brothers however are not so much coming up with powered flight - people had been flying gliders, balloons and such for a little bit and the concept was not truly shocking - but that the came up with a primative (but workable) control system (involving warping the wings to control the flyer) and techniques to be used in piloting the craft. Before the flyer, most flights were basically straight line "hope you don't end up hitting a tree" type things.
A quote on Richard Pearse (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like a glowing endorsement of the Wright brothers over Richard Pearse. Who wrote it? Richard Pearse, in a 1915 newspaper.
From the rather interesting BBC Magazine article [bbc.co.uk] on the history of flight:
"Aeronautical historian Philip Jarrett calls the claims 'grossly misleading'. 'This is local hero stuff. They choose to ignore their hero's own simple factual statements,' says Mr Jarrett."
Fortean Times (Score:5, Informative)
Fortean Times is here [forteantimes.com] if you've never heard of it before...
Re:The real invventors of the airplane. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No launch mechanism (Score:5, Informative)
NPR [npr.org] did a nice piece [npr.org] during the morning drive time.
but there's no question that the Wright brothers built the first airplane that a pilot could control and fly. The basic principles that were built into the Wright Flyer remain a part of every aircraft flying today.
Competing claims aside, I think we can all agree this was a great moment in American history at least.
Re:Ahem (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The real invventors of the airplane. (Score:2, Informative)
There's somethng about people that put "Period." after their opinions that just begs a refutation... and though you have tried to contrive a definition of "flight" to keep the trophy with the US; from the FA at least four flights made before the Wright Bros:
Man's First Powered Flight
Richard Pearse, Waitohi, New Zealand, March 31, 1902
Clement Ader flew back in 1890 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:fist flight? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ahem (Score:5, Informative)
OK. Tell me who flew the first circle in a powered and heavier than air aircraft?
The Wrights figured out how to steer and airplane in flight, they could turn. Nobody until them understood the mechanics of the turn (the rudder does not turn the airplane).
And I'm not even an American..
Re:War (Score:5, Informative)
Patent and Wright (Score:5, Informative)
In the end, the advance they made in flight technology was quickly squandered. European aviators lost little time in following the Wrights into the air. The brothers did receive a patent on their stabilization system in 1906, and they spent years trying to enforce it on both sides of the Atlantic. They were particularly zealous in going after American infringers - and the divisive, protracted court battles may have slowed down the commercialization of the plane on this side of the Atlantic. As one government official in 1917 put it, the brothers' lawsuits caused the country to fall "from first place to last of all the great nations in the air" - not exactly the stuff of legends.
Re:The real inventors of the airplane. (Score:5, Informative)
What the Wright Brothers did do is build the first successful, controllable airplane. The controllability is the key because they were the first folks to really work out how to make an airplane go where you want it to go. They also figured out that it was going to take some practice for the pilot to become proficient in flying it. They also built propellors whose efficiency wasn't bettered for decades and along the way they laid the foundation of the whole theory of propellors.
In fact, like the telephone, the airplane is a perfect example of one of those things whose creation is inevitable once the supporting technology is available. There were many, many folks working on the solution to powered flight once small and lightweight engines were available to power the craft. The groundwork had been laid more than a century before with Cayley's conceptual leaps all it took was somebody to work out the details perhaps with a leap or two of their own.
As a practical matter, history records that the aileron was invented by Glenn Curtiss in an attempt to get around the Wright patent on the airplane. History also records that it's not that difficult to get a newspaper reporter to write a story even if it's only printed in one paper. When people put forth the claim that the Wrights built a successful flying machine and the date on which it was done, they produce a photograph of their machine flying and a dated telegram with the details of the flights.
On the Website talking Mr. Pearse's claim, there is nothing of the sort. The lack of evidence that the machine flew is explained with "he didn't realize the historic importance of the flights". What crap! Flight had been a human dream for thousands of years. Wouldn't fulfilling that dream seem to you to be of some historic importance? Shouldn't it have occured to one of the numerous witnesses to mention something to somebody or to write it in a diary or something? Everyone else working on heavier than air flight seemed to realize they were solving a momentous problem, why didn't anyone in Waitohi, New Zealand?
Re:Progress? (Score:3, Informative)
in the 80's we added VTOL or Vertical Takeoff and LAnding... does the Harrier Jet ring a bell?
How about the F-111 stealth Fighter that rewrote flight dynamics how about the YF-22 fighter Designed in the 90's, the Mig-19 being designed in the 80's?
How about the design of the replacement space shuttle that WAS FLYING during tests but not chosen because of corruption at NASA. (Lifting body with VTOL capabilities.)
Hell a simple search on google can produce hundreds of webpages on advances in aircraft in the past 20 years.
Commercial flying will always go the absolute cheapest route... BUT the 777 is a modern aircraft and certianly was recently designed (within the last 15 years)
I suggest you do some more research...
Re:War (Score:3, Informative)
Russia is homeland for 1st airplane (Score:1, Informative)
by Alexandr Mozhaysky),
see (if you can read russian)
http://www.airshow.ru/people/mozhaysky.
He got his patents in 1881-82! Also see
http://www.maks.ru/etable.htm
Re:Inspiration for SCO.... (Score:2, Informative)
However, my understanding was that they were persuaded (by Henry Ford, the story goes) to release their hold on some of the patents for the good of the development of flight.
I don't think others "waited for the patents to expire".
I'm not an expert on the subject, so I'm not sure how much of this is hearsay...
Re:The real invventors of the airplane. (Score:3, Informative)
They *did* invent the propeller, in that they were the first to realize it should be an airfoil. Their design is around 90% as efficient as modern designs.
Re:The real invventors of the airplane. (Score:4, Informative)
You've associated the opinion incorrectly. The actual flights of Richard Pierce are not Bill Sherwood's opinions, they are documented. The "opinion" part is which one of Pierce's flights he considered to be a true "first flight". The point is, Pierce accomplished as much as, if not more than, the Wright Brothers did at Kitty Hawk and did it before them. So either they did not have the "first powered flight", or we have to re-define "first powered flight" to be something beyond what happened at Kitty Hawk.
For instance, some have suggested that the definition should be a controlled take-off, flight path, and landing completely under the airplane's power (including no catapult assisted take-off). That definition would probably put the Wright Brothers back as "first", but it certainly wasn't the 1903 Kitty Hawk flight, it would be sometime later.
Re:Progress? (Score:5, Informative)
The real advances have been things you don't see. Better control surfaces, more efficient, faster engines.
Fly by wire, computer controlled landings, far better navigation systems.
In the military world, we have aircraft that can accept a reprogramming of the target while in flight. There are weapons that can, even after being dropped, target a different area all the way to the impact point.
And then there are the things you really don't see. Small, unmanned aircraft (UCAV's), all but invisible to radar aircraft (B-2, F-117, F-22), realtime data links.
The B-2 is almost identical in size to the Northrup Flying Wing of 1949. But a significant improvement in function.
In short, there ave been amssive improvements, you just can't readily see them, because the basic airplane shape is non-mutable.
Wrights Skilled Engineers Who Launched an Industry (Score:3, Informative)
That's wrong. They were educated and skilled engineers living in a city that was a focal point of technology in 1903. They attacked their problem logically nd methodically, and were well-versed in the technical literature of the day.
The Wrights did not tinker their way to flight. The insights that allowed them to design and build an aircraft that could be controlled in all 3 axis wasn't an accident or a stroke of luck. Nor was their design and construction of a propellor appropriate for flight. (This was, in fact, revolutionary, and is usually overlooked. Efforts prior to the Wrights' had assumed that an aircraft propellor would be a copy of the kind of propellor used to propel a ship. That's incorrect -- it doesn't work -- and the Wrights were the first to understand that and to design, test, and use a true aeronautical propellor.)
After Kitty Hawk, and until Wilbur's premature death at the age of 45 in 1915, the Wrights continued their research, their flying, and their engineering efforts. Not only can we trace the airplane's lineage to the brothers, we can also credit them for founding the aeronuatical industry.
Re:Inspiration for SCO.... (Score:2, Informative)
SME: Subject Matter Expert
Re:Cue brazilian backlash! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Progress? (Score:2, Informative)
Brother Elmer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another one (Score:2, Informative)
Santos-Dumont (Score:2, Informative)
Alberto Santos-Dumont was an exceptional man but he simply did not fly an airplane before the Wright brothers. They flew in 1903 while Santos-Dumont -- according to his own notes -- took his first flight in 1906.
The only reason for the confusion was the secrecy that the Wright brothers insisted on surrounding themselves with. Even the French government, which was completely behind Santos-Dumont, acknowledges the Wright brothers as being first.
Re:Kind of like colossus (Score:3, Informative)
He is widely considered to be the inventor of the aeroplane (uk spelling
He was the first person to understand and write down the mathematical model describing the relationship between thrust, lift, drag and weight, for instance.
He also wrote about the ratio of lift to wing area, the determination of the center of wing pressure and the importance of streamlined shapes. He recognised that a tail assembly was essential to stability and control and produced the concepts of the braced biplane structure and the wheeled undercarriage.
But he wasn't just a scientist - he was an engineer too. Though he never built a powered plane - no powerplant light enough existed at the time - he successfully constructed gliders (complete with fixed, cambered wings, fuselage and a tail unit with elevators and rudder), and a 10 year old boy became the first person ever to fly as we understand it in 1849, on Brompton Dale in North Yorkshire, followed a few years later by Cayley's footman in an improved model, who became the first adult to fly.
He spent a lot of his life looking for that crucial power source, producing many innovative steam engine designs along the way. He had amazing foresight for a man of his time, speculating that 'when 100 horsepower can be contained in a pint pot, man will be able travel through the skies as easily as he presently travels on the oceans'.
Oh, and in his spare time, he invented the modern bicycle wheel, a mechanical hand (for one of his farm workers who lost his real hand in a threshing machine), the caterpillar tractor, stabiliser fins for missiles, railway safety equipment, and made several advances in Engine design that laid the foundations for the internal combustion engine.
As a fellow Yorkshireman I'm quite proud of his achievements. It sadens me that he is all but unknown in this country - in fact he is more widely known and acknowledged in the US.
James