For Jane's, Gustav Weißkopf's 1901 Liftoff Displaces Wright Bros. 267
gentryx writes "Newly found evidence supports earlier claims that Gustave Whitehead (a German immigrant, born Gustav Weißkopf, with Whitehead being the literal translation of Weißkopf) performed the first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight as early as 1901-08-14 — more than two years before the Wrights took off. A reconstructed image shows him mid-flight. A detailed analysis of said photo can be found here. Apparently the results are convincing enough that even Jane's chimes in. His plane is also better looking than the Wright Flyer I." (And when it comes to displacing the Wright brothers, don't forget Alberto Santos Dumont.)
What? (Score:3, Interesting)
That is rowboat with some kind of wings attached. Not flying wings but insect wings. Is this some kind of joke?
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
That is rowboat with some kind of wings attached. Not flying wings but insect wings. Is this some kind of joke?
No, it's conspiracy theorists at its best. Here's the actual analysis that went into the re-creation of the photo linked above:
http://www.gustave-whitehead.com/history/detailed-photo-analysis/ [gustave-whitehead.com]
As you can see, it's pretty much the "computer... magnify, rotate, enhance" sort of photo manipulation that "proves" flight. Whitehead was definitely a pioneer in aviation. But there is absolutely no evidence he created a steerable machine or even understood differential lift to cause banking in a plane to accomplish a curved, controlled, coordinated turn in flight like the Wright machine was able to accomplish.
Other people had been in the air before flight in gliders and on ground effect. A Frenchman named Ader lifted off the ground (barely) first, to disastrous consequences earlier (he, too, based his plane on a bird/bat design instead of scientific analysis and was unable to control it in flight). It was actually the earlier failures of Ader, Langley, and others that caused so many problems when the Wrights tried to sell their planes to the US and French military, who had seen the earlier failures and couldn't believe a couple of bicycle mechanics had cracked the problems of efficient propellers, steering, proper wing camber, and usable controls.
It was only after there was competition from aircraft manufacturers trying to invalidate the Wright patent that all this prior art suddenly magically materialized. The Wrights never lost a case.
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Then please explain the 85 newspaper articles from the time which all agree that Whitehead flew many times in 1901/1902.
True enough. I have a stack of World Weekly News and Paranoia! Magazine that support those findings.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure the newspaper articles are right and that Whitehead did fly. However what definition of "fly" were they using?
With the 20 HP motor, Whitehead probably had no problem lifting off the ground at least a few feet. The people watching would've been excited and certainly would've told others that they saw a machine fly.
But are we talking about sustained, controllable flight here? Or just hovering in ground effect in a straight line? Look at the picture with the bat wings and tell me -- if you know anything about aerodynamics at all -- what would've happened the first time that thing banked into a turn.
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I'm sure the newspaper articles are right and that Whitehead did fly. However what definition of "fly" were they using?
With the 20 HP motor, Whitehead probably had no problem lifting off the ground at least a few feet. The people watching would've been excited and certainly would've told others that they saw a machine fly.
But are we talking about sustained, controllable flight here? Or just hovering in ground effect in a straight line? Look at the picture with the bat wings and tell me -- if you know anything about aerodynamics at all -- what would've happened the first time that thing banked into a turn.
I heard it didn't even onboard wifi. Is flying without internet access really flying?
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With the 20 HP motor
The engine in the Wright Flyer was 12 HP.
But are we talking about sustained, controllable flight here? Or just hovering in ground effect in a straight line? Look at the picture with the bat wings and tell me -- if you know anything about aerodynamics at all -- what would've happened the first time that thing banked into a turn.
From TFA
After rigging the machine, Whitehead took off at dawn (5:02am), flying first half a mile, then on his second flight, a mile and a half at a height of 50 feet, making a shallow turn along the way to avoid a clump of chestnut trees.
Sounds controlled to me.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
The simplest explanation is that the Wright Brothers were first, and others were vying for attention, but none "flew" they just fell with style.
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Many people actually did get off the ground in the first decade of the 21st century.
Be fair, the TSA wasn't quite that strict last decade.
Re: What? (Score:2)
True enough. My mother flew out on holiday to New Zealand in 2003 and I am sure the Wrights beat her to it.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wright Bros were the first to demonstrate in a repeatable fashion the ability to fly above ground effect height and to do controlled turns. The key word being "repeatable". There were others who probably managed the same kind of flight, once or twice, but bad luck with crashes, or designs and workmanship that limited the lifespan of their creations to 2 or 3 flights, or some other factor put them out of the running.
I think an overlooked aspect of the Wright's success was their experience in running a bicycle shop, which led to them building an aircraft in a way where parts could be easily replaced or repaired... or upgraded when the initial design proved faulty. Which happened with at least the placement of the horizontal control surface and the pulley mechanism that warped the wings (their equivalent of aerolons).
Who designed and flew the first practical airplane (Score:4, Insightful)
Keyword is "practical". The Wright brothers did not fly a practical plane. All that they did, was groundwork that helped others to develop a real, practical plane.
I'm not convinced that Gustaf did anything remarkable, nor am I convinced that he did NOT do anything remarkable. The images in the citations are not impressive. Someone would have to copy it, and make it fly, for me to be impressed.
Let's remember, there were snake oil salesmen by the thousands back in the day. And, rainmakers. And, yes, they even had politicians back then. I need a little proof before I believe the thing in those images actually flew. I don't even require that it's flight time equals that of the Wright brothers. Just get it off the ground, under it's own power, and I'll accept that it can fly. Fifteen feet, fifty feet, five hundred feet of flight - none of it can happen if the damned thing won't get off the ground.
I'm just not a snake oil purchaser. I want videos, photos, and eyewitnesses by the score.
Re:Who designed and flew the first practical airpl (Score:4, Informative)
Keyword is "practical". The Wright brothers did not fly a practical plane.
The Wright brothers had achieved flights of over 5 minutes with multiple circular paths around the field within a year of the first powered flight success. And they incrementally improved their designs and concepts over many years. They were truly engineers, not romantics, and based their development on research, science, testing and feedback. They were instrumental in the development of practical aircraft.
Oh, you mean wifi and body scans and free gin-and-tonics? OK.
Re:Who designed and flew the first practical airpl (Score:4, Insightful)
So what it boils down to is exactly how you define flight. Just like who built the first working, practical computer depends on what definition you use (Colossus/ENIAC). It's annoying but just one of those things we will probably never know with certainly, just like who first broke the sound barrier in level flight.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when are newspapers absolutely reliable and unimpeachable sources? Newspapers trumpeted the discovery of N-rays [wikipedia.org] and the Cardiff Giant [wikipedia.org] too. No, then as now, the media prints and repeats all manner of daft and dodgy material. This goes double when they had no reliable manner of fact checking third party accounts. Sex, celebrity, scandal, and sensationalism sells, now, then, and likely forever...
There's a book floating about that tells the tale of Titanic from contemporary newspaper accounts, and it's sobering how wrong so many of them of were.
Which is what makes me suspicious as hell... you'd think something so widely anticipated as powered, heavier than air flight would have much more widely reported. You'd also suspect that (as happened with the Wright Brothers), when it was widely reported - anywhere from dozens to hundreds of copycats would emerge relatively quickly. The newspapers would then, as they did after the Wright Brothers, report on those as well.
What you wouldn't expect if for it to vanish without a ripple.
They can't be conclusively disproved, no. But only a conspiracy theorist would accept that as 'proof', as they can't conclusively be proven either. That leaves the researcher to turn to other materials - materials noticeably absent in this case. This is why the supporters of this notion had to resort to photo manipulation and 'analysis' of a degree that would make even "Face on Mars" and "We Never Went to the Moon" nutters blush.
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Wright's 1903 flight was not widely reported/known until a few years later. People at the turn of the century already had gliders, hot air balloons, and dirigibles. Hot air balloons were used in the civil war and of course well before that too.
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And since then, all planes have used wing warping for controlled flight.
Oh, hang on...
Re: What? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can thank the Wright Bros for their patented wing warping and their resistance to selling licenses for that to any competitors. If they had not done that, ailerons would not have been invented.
I also thank you for the correct spelling of that word. It is just so logical that it should have "aero-" as its root that I even have trouble googling for the right spelling.
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As you can see, it's pretty much the "computer... magnify, rotate, enhance" sort of photo manipulation that "proves" flight.
I think that's being generous.
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A boat-plane-car, the ultimate vehicle!
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The airframe is very similar to O. Lilienthal gliders, which actually flew.
This story is acknowledged by Jane's All the World's Aircraft which I think is a reliable authority, including the stinky deal "the Smithsonian shall [not state] any aircraft...earlier than the Wright aeroplane of 1903...was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight"
http://www.janes.com/products/janes/defence-security-report.aspx?ID=1065976994 [janes.com]
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Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, he took the design of the wright flyer and bolted wheels onto the bottom of it. The tricky part that nobody got before the Wrights was the wing cross-section. They worked a *lot* to get it correct - they thew out existing data on airfoil and lift data and created their own measuring device to figure out the best shape.
Not taking anything away from Dumont - he made some good improvements to the design of the Wright flyer. However, there's a reason why everything before Wright's plane looked like a bird or a bat, and everything after looked like a Wright Flyer.
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Another first? (Score:5, Interesting)
First use of Unicode characters in Slashdot?
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It was hardcoded. Somebody had to directly edit the row in MySQL to insert the non-alphanumeric ascii character into it.
Re:Another first? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, shieße! you learn something new everyday.
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die FR1ßT POßTEN!
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So, I guess the username/password is posted somewhere? Or maybe they are given out for getting a certain achievement? Or it just uses the defaults?
Everyone and their dog seems to be able to access it.
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Well, shieße! you learn something new everyday.
The S Sharp is U+00DF, and thus part of ISO 8859-1; maybe that's what they're allowing? Here go a few more: ñ ® ÿ
Lowercase ÿ goes through; uppercase Y with umlaut/diaresis doesn't. Euro sign € goes through. The "universal currency symbol" U+00A4 doesn't.
Conclusion: it's ISO 8859-15.
And I'm sure it should be Scheiße; the German Language capitalizes all Nouns.
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Story submitter here. (Score:3)
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ASCII indeed. But it's called an Esset, FYI.
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Or Eszett, if you're good at spelling. :)
When will people learn (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just about discovery, but about sharing that discovery. Lots of people made it to the Americas before Columbus, but because his discovery of it became well known, he gets credit. If I invent practical cold fusion in my back yard but never share that, well, then I deserve to be forgotten.
Re:When will people learn (Score:5, Interesting)
Mendel tried to share. Wegener tried to share. Aristarchus of Samos tried to share. Society chose to cover their ears, close their eyes, and sing "la la la".
Re:When will people learn (Score:5, Interesting)
Mendel tried to share. Wegener tried to share. Aristarchus of Samos tried to share. Society chose to cover their ears, close their eyes, and sing "la la la".
Schrader, Ambrose, Rüdiger and van der Linde also tried to share their discovery, but ultimately, the German High command decided not to use nerve agents against allied targets in WWII.
Some things should not be "shared".
Re:When will people learn (Score:5, Interesting)
While the Wright Brother's first reaction was to patent the invention, Santos Dumont freely spread his schematics and helped people who wanted to copy his inventions, in the true spirit of sharing knowledge (like Free Software). So by your own definition the W.B. should be forgotten...
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So by your own definition the W.B. should be forgotten
I'm not the AC, however patents are not secrets, by design they "share knowledge" with the general public. What the WBs did differently to the others is they monopolised the commercial opportunities.
Since both were based on Hargrave's box kite ... (Score:3)
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Richard Pearse (Score:4, Informative)
let's not forget Richard Pearse too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse [wikipedia.org]
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There were quite a few "crashers" around that time. People flew, but rarely in a "controlled" manner.
Although the Wrights' earliest flights were arguably not very well documented either, they continued with improvements on the same design and within a couple of years finally stunned large crowds in European air shows with their maneuverability that was completely unmatched by others. Thus, there was a chain of stronger and stronger evidence and witnesses.
The true "first" may be forever debatable, but it wa
Smithsonian (Score:5, Informative)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead [wikipedia.org]
"When the Flyer was finally brought back and presented to the Smithsonian in 1948, the museum and the executors of the Wright estate signed an agreement (popularly called a "contract") in which the Smithsonian promised not to say that any airplane before the Wrights' was capable of manned, powered, controlled flight.[37][note 5] This agreement was not made public."
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History at its finest. And we call it a science.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_history_a_science [answers.com]
I would wish they taught shit like this to science graduates. So many miss this lesson.
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Unless, after launching, it continued to fly under its own power. At that point we can safely call it a plane. Unless many "planes" launched off carriers are actually "glorified gliders" as well, of course.
Re:Smithsonian (Score:5, Informative)
With Smithsonian approval, Glenn Curtiss extensively modified the Aerodrome and made a few short flights in it in 1914, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to bypass the Wright Brothers' patent on aircraft and to vindicate Langley. Based on these flights, the Smithsonian displayed the Aerodrome in its museum as the first heavier-than-air manned, powered aircraft "capable of flight." This action triggered a feud with Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright had died in 1912), who accused the Smithsonian of misrepresenting flying machine history. Orville backed up his protest by refusing to donate the original 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer to the Smithsonian, instead donating it to extensive collections of the Science Museum of London in 1928. The dispute finally ended in 1942 when the Smithsonian published details of the Curtiss modifications to the Aerodrome and recanted its claims for the aircraft.
Langley Aerodrome [wikipedia.org]
Langley's simple approach was merely to scale up the unpiloted Aerodromes to human-carrying proportions. This would prove to be a grave error, as the aerodynamics, structural design, and control system of the smaller aircraft were not adaptable to a full-sized version. Langley's primary focus was the power plant. The completed engine, a water-cooled five-cylinder radial that generated a remarkable 52.4 horsepower, was a great achievement for the time.
Despite the excellent engine, the Aerodrome A, as it was called, met with disastrous results, crashing on takeoff on October 7, 1903, and again on December 8. Langley blamed the launch mechanism. While this was in some small measure true, there is no denying that the Aerodrome A was an overly complex, structurally weak, aerodynamically unsound aircraft. This second crash ended Langley's aeronautical work entirely.
Langley Aerodrome A [si.edu]
Achieving dynamic control in three dimensions was the Wrights' great obsession.
They were as intensely focused on learning how to fly as they were on the evolution and refinement of their mechanical designs.
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If you are getting your info from the Whitehead site, the guy seems like a bit of a quack:
Quote from:
http://www.gustave-whitehead.com/history-of-whitehead-critics/ [gustave-whitehead.com]
"Interestingly, Wright (or his attorney) tried to be too clever when tying up the Smithsonian, and the latter's trustees, apparently, failed to notice the blunder: By referring to "any aircraft" and not "airplane", the document prohibits the Smithsonian from even admitting that, since 1852, dozens of dirigable airships (indisputably 'craft of the
True (Score:2)
Except this guy still thinks they are honoring the contract:
"To this day, the terms of employment of all employees of the Smithsonian Institute require them to say the Wrights flew first (a scandal reaching far beyond the history of aviation – negotiated history?)"
So they are honoring some parts of the contract, but not others? Riiiight.
Yeah, right (Score:3, Interesting)
That looks like an absolute fake... I'd love the engineering analysis to show if that things could conceivably fly.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the articles shows two differnet replicas being built and flown 1986 and 1998 in USA and Germany.
The only issue I have with it is the engine that would have been needed to get it in the air shouldn't have existed then. It appears the original engines he used no longer exist, so it will remain a mystery. The claims he made on engine weight and HP are quite a bit ridiculous for the time. As for the design of the plane, it could easily fly, but wouldn't be my first choice to try out, maybe if it had a larger rudder because in a slight wind it would probably be impossible to land.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't think it could. It was a monoplane with two engines (one diesel) and the wing design looks like it would not provide much lift at all. Plus the fuselage looks like it would have a lot of drag.
I call bullshit
Picking nits (Score:5, Interesting)
Might be overly critical, but from the picture it looks an awful lot like that thing is gliding off the top of a hill. That's quite a bit different than lifting off of a flat surface.
How "reconstructed" is that photograph, anyway? That fence in the foreground looks weird.
Re:Picking nits (Score:5, Informative)
The reconstructed photo is a montage of known images stuck together to match the analysis of the highly magnified zoomed portions of the photos. Seriously.
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How "reconstructed" is that photograph, anyway? That fence in the foreground looks weird.
You have a good eye! That's the first thing that struck me as well. Look at the top left corner of the nearest fence post at about 150% magnification. That looks like poor cropping. And the illumination on it doesn't match ambient lighting. The "graining" on the fence doesn't match the rest of the image either. AND look at the bottom edge of the photo. Looks like the image continues below the black line, but the fence doesn't. Why the heck would somebody bother adding it? Not like it contributes anything to
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Contemporary newspaper reports (85+ of them!), including that from an eye-witness, Chief Editor of the Bridgeport Herald, says it took off from a flat surface:
http://www.janes.com/products/janes/defence-security-report.aspx?ID=1065976994 [janes.com]
Still earlier flight in 1873 (Score:5, Funny)
The Wrights invented flying (Score:5, Insightful)
I watched a multi-part documentary on TV about the development of aircraft, emphasis on military aircraft, but there was talk about the Wright Bros and Santos-Dumont also. What I particularly remember is that one commentator said that while others were getting things off the ground, it was the Wright Brothers who understood the inherit instability of a plane. Others thought of a plane as a bit like a boat in the water, but the Wrights had been bicycle mechanics, and knew that one had to constantly control a bicycle, and they studied how birds, for example, had to constantly adjust their wings. What impressed people at the 1908 Paris Air Show wasn't just that the plane flew, but that it was so maneuverable, doing figure 8s, that kind of thing.
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Yup, they had no clue about aerodynamic stability. They should have added weight at the front, then increased the upwards pitch of their canard. *That* would have resulted in a stable aircraft.
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, it was the Wright Brothers who understood the inherit instability of a plane. Others thought of a plane as a bit like a boat in the water, but the Wrights had been bicycle mechanics, and knew that one had to constantly control a bicycle,
As a cyclist, that makes sense. It could also explain the instinct to change direction by banking rather than simply turning the vehicle in the plane, as one would do with a 4-wheeled vehicle on land, or through use of a rudder with a boat. As anyone who has ever ridde
Not convincing to me (Score:2)
I can agree with every one of their photo interpretations, except for the important one. That one, to me, looks like a plane suspended in a room (or, maybe, held up by several people). In other words, it looks like an exhibit, not a plane in flight.
That's not flying.... (Score:3)
... it's falling. With style.
-S
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Of course diving off a cliff is easy. It's the "missing the ground" part that's hard. Once you get that down, flying is easy...
(you should recognize this ref...)
We call BS! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if the Wright brothers were first or not. But, I do know that this "re-creation" is BS. I read TFA and carefully viewed the images. There is nothing that actually shows the darn thing flying and there are many clear photographs of it on the ground. Someone mentioned evidence in court. Well, I am an attorney and this case is a laugher!
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Well, I am an attorney and this case is a laugher!
Is that legal advice?
It's absolutely true (Score:5, Funny)
And the Wright brothers couldn't get clearance from the tower due to all the other aviators being in the air already.
Smithsonian Denied Access To Photos (Score:5, Interesting)
"The William J. Hammer Collection is located at the Smithsonian Institute, Researchers are denied access: Hammer Collection archival note denying access to researchers"
you would think that they would at least make copies available. What good are the photos if they are locked away in a vault where nobody can ever look at them?
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From the Jane's article:
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That was a perfectly reasonable restriction to put in-place, considering the bad faith the Smithsonian had shown in the years before, a protracted legal battle over falsely trying to promote one
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Exactly the right (Wright?) point.
From TFA:
The William J. Hammer Collection is located at the Smithsonian Institute: http://airandspace.si.edu/research/arch/findaids/pdf/william_j_hammer_collection_finding_aid.pdf [si.edu]
Researchers are denied access:
My thoughts precisely; what good are photos that can never be viewed?
The Smithsonian has (in my personal experience) always been a strong partner of digitization and research. Unless and until they release those photos, the 'interpretation' of the photos - as assiduou
CSI (Score:3)
CSI would have enhanced those pictures enough to read the label on Gustav's clothing. Don't know why Jane's is sticking with blurry pictures when TV proves they can do better.
Controlled flight (Score:2, Insightful)
Never mind the Ohio and North Carolina dispute (Score:2)
The dispute over *whom* was first aside, two states(North Carolina and Ohio) have tried to take credit for the Wright Brothers' invention. North Carolina provided the field, and Ohio provided everything else.
Reconstructed = artist's impression (Score:2)
A reconstructed image shows him mid-flight.
Well, yes, in the same sense that a still from Superman shows him in mid-flight too. As far as I can glean, there was an original photograph, from which a lithograph was made - and lithographers, it would seem from the article, commonly "re-imagined" such scenes for artistic purposes - replacing backgrounds, and the like. Based on other altered lithographs, someone has tried to "undo" these changes (which sounds a dubious method to say the very least) to give an idea of what the original photograph looked l
like hell that thing flew (Score:2)
1) Weight to lift surface ratio--I don't care how thin those boards are, it weighed too much.
2) Control--no way that wing configuration delivered control.
At best that thing might have glided a bit--but I doubt it even could do that.
Change in terminology (Score:2)
From now on all my bad photoshop hacks will be deemed as a "reconstructed image".
Re:Earliest powered heavier than air maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody can land. The good ones can land twice.
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Landing twice doesn't take skill - just inertia.
Landing in a way that you can walk away from it takes skill.
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...but controlled flight? No.
From the Wikipedia article linked in the summary, it seems like one of his runs promptly crashed into a building with the steam engine powering the craft badly scalding Gustav himself. This pretty much ended his experimental flights, as whatever method that was devised to control his aircraft was obviously insufficient.
The Wright flyer on the other hand had full control (pitch, yaw, and roll) as far as modern flight is concerned. It could do figure 8 turns and could go back around to land where it started. Quite important, since being able to land has more to do with having a safe flight than anything else.
The first Wright flyer was a joke. Didn't have enough power to lift off the ground; didn't even have wheels, just skids. It was only controllable in a very limited way. They didn't fly figure eights for another couple of years. They were also secretive, didn't share their ideas, and in fact refused to give demonstrations to prospective buyers without a deposit. People back in Cleveland did see some of their experimental flights between Kittyhawk and later public demonstrations, but not many; they were
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It was in Reims, 1908. The Champagne companies sponsored a flight week there. I completely agree with the rest. The Wrights were maybe not the first in powered flight, but certainly the first aviation patent trolls in history.
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You, sir, are an idiot.
Do a little actual historical research ... visit a library. Ever hear of the Wright B Flyer??
1910. Their FIFTH practical design. (Flyers I, II, and III, Model A, Model B) Landing gear, elevator at the rear, capable of carrying a PASSENGER, and produced in quantity, not a "one-off" experiment. Sold under contract to various branches of the U.S. military. And you can take a ride on one anytime you like at the Wright Brothers airport in south Dayton, Ohio.
Furthermore, in the years betwe
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Given that this is equally fallacious, almost the same relevance.
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Re:Gutenberg wasn't first either (Score:5, Informative)
Politics and penis-waving aside (though Whitehead lived in Connecticut when he built it, but anyway...)
Given the image, I'd love to see if someone actually managed to reconstruct the thing and see if it actually can fly... ah, wait - someone managed it [wikipedia.org] )
Re:Gutenberg wasn't first either (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gutenberg wasn't first either (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA, you'll see that Whitehead was using wing-warping as well, several years before the Wright Bros. How the Wright Bros. got their patents on wing-warping is a mystery.
Re:Gutenberg wasn't first either (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly; this is the story as it was told to me too. There were other airplanes before the Wrights', but they took off, flew a bit, and then crashed. The Wrights' was the first one that was decently controllable in flight, and amazed the crowds in Paris by turning and banking and landing safely, rather than just crashing like the others. The Wrights didn't invent heavier-than-air powered flight, they made the first controllable airplance.
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So how can we ensure inventors can cooperate freely, and build up on one another's ideas? I know! Patents!
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Wright brothers patented a lot of the mechanics of the aircraft they built and later prevented Curtis & other US aviators from progressing. By the time the Great War had started, European aviation was greatly ahead of the USA's efforts.
Re:Gutenberg wasn't first either (Score:5, Informative)
Wright brothers patented a lot of the mechanics of the aircraft they built and later prevented Curtis & other US aviators from progressing. By the time the Great War had started, European aviation was greatly ahead of the USA's efforts.
I know it is fashionable to blame patents for all the ills that plague humanity but stagnation in the US aircraft industry prior to the US entry into the Great War was down to more than just patents. Most of the aviation advances in Europe were due to state aviation challenges that featured big purses, air racing and most importantly military expenditure on aviation. In Germany and France for example military spending was a key factor in the expansion of the pre-war aviation industry and a key factor in technological advancement prior to 1914. Even in 1910-1914 both the German/French armies and navies were ordering aircraft by the hundreds. The USA's expenditure in the same period was a joke and despite US industry eventually accepting massive orders to supply the UK and the French with aircraft, large portions of the US air service had to be equipped with aircraft by the French and the British including the entire US fighter fleet on the Western Front. Civilian aviation as a technological motivator only began to assume any degree of importance when Hugo Junkers wheeled out the all metal Junkers F13 in 1919 to everybody's surprise and people found it was more sophisticated technologically than contemporary military machines. Especially because the F13 prototype could lift well over half a metric ton on a salvaged 160hp Mercedes engine.
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Sorry—busted. After in-depth analysis, I determined that Jesus is a poor lifting body and, indeed, aerodynamically unstable. It would have been difficult for him to maintain altitude, much less ascend to heaven.
The most likely explanation is mistaken identity; perhaps the crowd saw Mecha-Jesus, who, as is commonly known, possesses greek fire rocket boots and a deployable rogallo wing.
Alternatively, if Jesus was still crucified, it would have been possible to construct a simple (albeit extremely large)
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Oh, I'm sure Adam and Jamie could make it fly ... with the application of sufficient quantities of C-4...