[HN Gopher] The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? No...
___________________________________________________________________
The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in
Brazil
Author : benbreen
Score : 191 points
Date : 2025-03-22 01:55 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| rgehan wrote:
| http://archive.today/2025.03.21-091549/https://www.washingto...
| aap_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| munchler wrote:
| Lilienthal flew with gliders. The Wright brothers claim the
| first powered flight (i.e. an airplane).
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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).
| clippyplz wrote:
| If they are the first to build an airplane that "actually
| worked", then why would it be inappropriate to say they
| invented an airplane?
|
| It wouldn't be appropriate to say "they were responsible
| for 100% of the technological development and research
| that led to this machine" but if that's what "invented"
| means then nobody has ever invented anything.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Their invention patent (US 821,393) correctly claims the
| invention of a 3-axis airplane orientation control
| system, not the invention of the airplane, which is
| treated as a well-known class of flying-machines, which
| is improved by their invention.
|
| An airplane without good aircraft controls could start to
| fly without problems, but it would normally crash sooner
| or later, either due to flight instabilities or because
| it had to eventually land somewhere.
| xandrius wrote:
| Say, if I invent everything to make a bike work but the
| wheels just happen to be a teeny tiny too small to
| actually allow someone to ride it uninterrupted.
|
| You come and adjust them. Did you just invent the bike?
| Or did you build upon my previous invention(s) and
| perfected it, making us both partial inventors?
| mannykannot wrote:
| You only get partial credit unless you figured out what,
| precisely, needed to be done, but had someone else do it
| for you.
| nyeah wrote:
| 'if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever
| invented anything.'
|
| People invent things. But "airplane" turned out to be
| much more than one thing. Not all of them were invented
| by Curtiss (a local favorite), or by Santos-Dumont, or by
| Lilienthal, Caproni, the Wrights, or whoever.
| nyeah wrote:
| Not really disagreeing, but history and technology are
| both messy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_f
| irst_airplane_f...
| Zak wrote:
| I think it's fair to say someone invented a thing if they
| design and build the first one that actually works. The
| concept of an airplane had been around for a while by
| 1903, but nobody had one. Similarly today we have the
| concept of a warp drive. We even have that concept
| outside the realm of science fiction now, but we're far
| from having a working prototype and don't even know if a
| practical example can be built.
|
| It's also fair to debate what qualifies as an airplane.
| If I were to list criteria, I would include two that the
| first Wright Flyer did not demonstrate: the ability to
| take off from level ground under its own power, and
| sufficient maneuverability to return to and land at the
| point of departure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The 1903 did take off under its own power. The catapult
| came later.
| Zak wrote:
| I had the impression it took off downhill for that
| flight, failing my criterion, but it actually took off
| from level ground with a strong headwind. I'll give it
| partial credit; I don't think its rail would have been
| long enough in calm wind.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Fun fact: all airplanes take off into the wind as much as
| possible.
| Zak wrote:
| I know, but any practical airplane can take off in calm
| wind from level ground. The first Wright Flyer required a
| strong headwind or downhill angle.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Flyer was on a rail with a wheeled cart. The fact
| that it moved forward under its own power (faster than
| Orville could run) demonstrated that it could take off in
| a calm, just that the rail would have had to be longer.
|
| Their experiments with it ended when a gust flipped it on
| the ground and broke it beyond repair.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Or you want an American, in which case the Wright Brothers
| won
| gota wrote:
| As is tradition.
| VMG wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| readingnews wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, as an American I never was taught that Ford invented
| cars. He invented _cheap_ cars.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 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.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Oldsmobile invented the assembly line for cars:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_E._Olds#Assembly_line
| sofixa wrote:
| 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...
| ominous_prime wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| figomore wrote:
| About Radio here in Brazil there is other one: Roberto
| Landell de Moura
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Exactly. Ford didn't actually _invent_ anything. Kinda like
| Jobs and Woz didn 't invent the IC or CPU or even PC. He
| 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.
| bane wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles has an excellent video on this
| topic. The Wrights _did_ in fact invent the airplane first and
| provided extensive detailed documentation showing their work.
| Alberto Santos-Dumont was working with extremely primitive
| propellers, basically canoe paddles, that couldn 't get the job
| done. He and others recreating his designs later used Wright-
| designed propellers to get his designs into the air. The Wrights
| being the first is further evidenced by them being the first to
| _both_ discover _and_ solve the adverse yaw effect, without doing
| this controlled flight is impossible. Alberto Santos-Dumont 's
| designs had not accounted for this, showing that he hadn't flown.
|
| Some argue that the Wright's flights don't count because they
| used a "rail" (long piece of wood acting as a runway, because
| runways did not then exist) or used a catapult. Both of these
| arguments are bullshit, the catapult argument in particular
| because their first flights at Kitty Hawk didn't use a catapult.
| db48x wrote:
| And they only used a wooden rail the first year at Kitty Hawk,
| when they only had a glider. They had decided to tackle the
| problem of control first and propulsion later. The glider took
| off by sliding downhill on a rail, while the Flyer they built
| the next year took off under its own power on level ground.
|
| Not only that, but they were the first to realize that the
| tables of lift published by whatshisname the French guy were
| bogus. They built a wind tunnel so that they could make their
| own measurements of lift and drag. Weirdly, the wind tunnel had
| been invented ~50 years earlier! Apparently most of the
| Europeans who were playing with gliders that whole time didn't
| even know about wind tunnels or they might have thought to put
| two and two together.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| It seems like the propellers worked fine.
|
| > On 23 October, Santos-Dumont presented himself at Bagatelle
| with the Oiseau de Proie II, a modification of the original
| model. The plane had been varnished to reduce the porosity of
| the fabric and increase lift. The rear wheel had been removed.
| In the morning he limited himself to manoeuvring the aircraft
| across the field, until the propeller shaft broke. It was
| repaired in the afternoon, and the plane was moved into
| position for an official attempt. An expectant crowd was
| present. At 4:45 pm, Santos-Dumont started the engine.[107] The
| plane lifted off and flew for 60 metres,[26]: 18 without taking
| advantage of headwinds, ramps, catapults, slopes, or other
| devices. The flight had taken place solely by the aircraft's
| own means, and Europeans at the time believed it was the first
| such achievement.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| That is with a wright propeller, almost 3 years after the
| first powered flight of the wright flyer.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| So, the Europeans at the time believed it was the first
| such achievement, but Dumont somehow was able to get hold
| of some propellers nobody in Europe heard about? Seems a
| bit far-fetched.
|
| As I said in another comment, the Wright Brothers were
| pretty secretive about their works and it wasn't until 1908
| that people in Europe knew about them.
| lupusreal wrote:
| This is the sort of propeller he was trying to use before
| getting the Wright design. It doesn't work:
|
| https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj.
| ..
|
| https://tegustanlosaviones.blogspot.com/2019/02/14-bis.html
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| How he could've got the Wright design when nobody in Europe
| have heard about the Wright experiments by the time Dumont
| flew his plane? Truth is, the Wright Brothers were pretty
| secretive about their works and it wasn't until 1908 that
| people in Europe knew about them.
|
| Also, by this photo, that propeller seems to be working:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Santos_-
| _Nov12_1906.jpg
| stzsch wrote:
| Also radio:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
| maratc wrote:
| The correct link is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Popov_(physicist) of
| course :)
| fermigier wrote:
| If you're French, it's Clement Ader:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader
| idoubtit wrote:
| 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.
| xoa wrote:
| I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more
| history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and
| other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes
| absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks
| pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a
| very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces
| together. And how the pieces come together can change the
| course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take
| rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including
| significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the
| economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016
| and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been
| going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where
| we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on
| economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space
| Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully
| automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real
| flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an
| orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years
| before someone came around again.
|
| So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not
| something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been
| created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been
| small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years
| isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few
| years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had
| a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they
| launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized
| satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech
| change but just because being have stupendous history changing
| amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows
| whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86
| million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and
| Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch
| Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow
| and aren't slowing down.
|
| You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for
| good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't
| think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become
| trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that
| yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But
| that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard
| work and can be key to actually changing the world.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again.
|
| Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened
| if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of
| cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
| db48x wrote:
| We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was
| still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets
| that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of
| travel time instead of months, and much larger payload
| fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk
| about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later
| after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was
| revealed just how dangerous the they were.
| diffuse_l wrote:
| It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after
| the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to
| ignore it. Commercial crew would probably not come to be
| (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't
| around to prove that it's possible
| db48x wrote:
| It took another accident before anyone took the danger
| seriously enough to ground the Shuttle.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| SpaceX has made a lot of real advancements while delivering
| real launches. You're thinking of Boeing.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Space in the US has always been extremely political.
| SpaceX is a more recent kind of politicisation which
| happens to be palatable to the current neoliberal
| orthodoxy, which follows the usual cycle of "break
| something the government runs by defunding it and
| interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow
| about how inefficient big government is."
|
| If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and
| not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like
| Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a
| moon base and Mars landings long before now.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| There is a vast gulf of time between the 1970s and
| SpaceX. The space shuttle alone, fully NASA-run, was a
| (beautiful-looking) failure long before SpaceX came
| along. And it was fully government-designed and
| government-run. It was also astonishingly expensive.
|
| Good things can happen in the private sector or the
| public sector. SpaceX is a good thing happening in the
| private sector. No one's brain has to go running to
| Republican-bashing and history compression to
| counterbalance that to avoid thinking new thoughts.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The space shuttle had government specified requirements
| (a single vehicle to do everything including capturing
| soviet satellites and ferrying people into orbit)
| pfdietz wrote:
| It had to do everything because the business case for it
| (that it would have sufficient ROI) required it. Even
| then, the business case was basically fraudulent, and the
| reality was even worse than the critics like Mondale were
| saying.
| tekla wrote:
| I have no idea why you think NASA would have gotten to
| the moon starting in the 70's. Every single dollar was
| being spent flying the Shuttle and setting up the ISS
| during the 80s-2010's.
| quacked wrote:
| No engineer that works for SpaceX, with SpaceX, or is
| closely connected to engineers who work for SpaceX would
| agree with your assessment that SpaceX's success is due
| to:
|
| > "break[ing] something the government runs by defunding
| it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then
| crow about how inefficient big government is."
|
| It is possible that this will occur going forward now
| that Elon is a de facto government official, though.
| Also, the engineers in 1970s NASA are what created the
| Space Shuttle.
| gcanyon wrote:
| > we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had
| properly funded NASA
|
| Sure we do, just watch For All Mankind :-)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)
| __egb__ wrote:
| IMO, even more important than funding is that NASA rockets
| are now designed by Congressional committee. It's hard to
| innovate when you're pressured into reusing Shuttle
| components to keep the money flowing to specific
| contractors.
| xoa wrote:
| > _Problem here is that we don 't know what could have
| happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences
| instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising
| SpaceX._
|
| Uh, SpaceX didn't come into being until 2002. And the Space
| Shuttle was not in any way cheap, nor a pile of things we
| did with it. Nor did the US Government in any way subsidize
| SpaceX, anymore then it "subsidizes" paper manufacturers
| by... ordering paper for its printers. It contracted with
| SpaceX for commercial services at a fixed price, and has
| saved billions and billions of dollars as a result. You
| seem a touch confused on timelines here.
|
| And my entire point was that whatever _could_ have been
| done, it _wasn 't_. As I said, the government absolutely
| could have pursued other far fundamentally better concepts
| at the end of Apollo. Or it could have done commercial way
| earlier, getting out of the launch business entirely and
| working to switch over to a competitive private market
| 30-40 years earlier. What actually happened is that without
| the focus and level of discipline provided by a big
| ambitious goal and national spirit as a guiding star, more
| typical political incentives crept in and rapidly distorted
| the space program. Which resulted in enormous waste and
| stagnation as well as killing a lot of incredible people
| for no reason.
|
| But regardless of how it happened, again the point is that
| it wasn't the scientific and tech environment that created
| a small window of a few years where inevitably practical
| economic mass launch designs would come about. It still
| took the right vision and right spark.
| db48x wrote:
| Technically NASA contracted with SpaceX (and several
| other companies as well, such as Boeing) to develop crew-
| rated versions of their rockets. That was explicitly a
| development contract where NASA paid a couple of billion
| up front to entice those companies to develop a crewed
| craft capable of visiting the ISS. Later they bought
| rides to and from the ISS from SpaceX and Boeing. SpaceX
| used that money and some of their own to go from the
| Falcon 1 to the Falcon 9. Since then NASA has bought
| flights on Falcon 9 rockets for launching satellites and
| space probes in addition to crewed flights to the ISS.
|
| So yea, definitely a prudent investment. But also some
| subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing.
| And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
| xoa wrote:
| > _Technically NASA contracted with SpaceX (and several
| other companies as well, such as Boeing) to develop crew-
| rated versions of their rockets_
|
| No, the initial NASA contract was for cargo delivery via
| the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS)
| program, which dated to 2006. CRS and CC came
| significantly afterwards. Momentum did build but it was
| in fits and starts. It's a pretty fascinating bit of
| history in turns of twists and turns on both the
| political and technical sides, I highly recommend taking
| a look at the book _Liftoff_ if you 're at all curious.
| Like, even if it was selfish motivations it's worth
| noting that Commercial Crew probably would not have
| happened in 2010 without the support of Boeing itself.
|
| > _But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion
| wasted on Boeing._
|
| Eh, I wouldn't fully agree with this sentiment honestly.
| The future we've arrived at was definitely not clear when
| the contracts were signed, and shit happens. If you're
| really serious about developing a new capability and
| place a few fully independent investment bets and some
| pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't
| call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which
| would work and which wouldn't. That's just how it works.
| It's worth noting here too that Boeing has lost enormous
| amounts of money on its failures with Starliner. NASA has
| held them to the fixed price aspect of the contract. I
| suppose an argument could be made that NASA was more
| generous with milestone payments then they might have
| been, but at the same time that ultimately was Boeing
| shooting itself in the foot and NASA giving them rope
| because getting some money earlier didn't change the
| total pot at all. So if Boeing rushed, well that came
| back to bite them very hard.
|
| > _And even more billions wasted on SLS too._
|
| That's pure old space pork and a totally separate
| discussion beyond being another example of how decades
| can flow by on garbage.
| db48x wrote:
| > If you're really serious about developing a new
| capability and place a few fully independent investment
| bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust,
| I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't
| know which would work and which wouldn't.
|
| Sure, that's true. But my point is that those initial
| investments were a subsidy. They weren't buying a product
| that already existed, they were paying someone to develop
| a product so that they could buy the product once it
| existed. It definitely paid off, even counting the money
| spent on Starliner.
|
| > That's pure old space pork and a totally separate
| discussion beyond being another example of how decades
| can flow by on garbage.
|
| Agreed. I am just saying that the left hand doesn't know
| what the right hand is doing. At this point we'd be
| better off cancelling SLS and doing our next moon mission
| by launching smaller craft into Earth orbit on Falcon
| Heavy and docking them together. Like Apollo but with
| several launches spread out over a week instead of a
| single giant rocket. We could even assemble a cycler that
| way.
| tzs wrote:
| > Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated
| vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3
| scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one)
| with the DC-X in 1993.
|
| Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?
| db48x wrote:
| An orbital craft is moving at hypersonic speeds, which is a
| especially tricky when going backwards. Things moving
| through fluids tend to want to flip over so that the part
| with the highest drag is at the rear, so that drag is
| minimized. Meanwhile the engine bay of a rocket is not
| generally shaped to have low drag when pushing through the
| air.
| tzs wrote:
| Wouldn't any spacecraft designed to return to Earth non-
| destructively, regardless of whether it was going to land
| vertically or land like an airplane or land with a
| parachute, first slow down to subsonic speeds before
| getting to the phase of the flight where the landing
| system is invoked?
| immibis wrote:
| It slows down by burning stuff and making hot stuff go
| out one end. That end is the one worse for air drag,
| because it has all the bits where the hot stuff comes
| out.
| db48x wrote:
| No. Go watch a Falcon 9 booster recovery
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_90o1KLkM> on Youtube;
| you'll see that when it starts its landing burn it is ~5
| miles up and flying engines first towards the ground at
| ~1300 miles per hour.
| xoa wrote:
| > _Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?_
|
| Orbital is what actually provides any significant economic
| value. But the nature of the Rocket Equation, effects with
| atmosphere, and how those interact with the limits of our
| material science means that there is an absolutely enormous
| gulf between a sounding rocket and getting to orbital
| velocity and back again. All of that is what makes it so
| hard but it's also required to be of any real practical
| use. So the DC-X was a noteworthy historical milestone/demo
| and test bed but going from there to something like the
| Falcon 9 let alone Starship takes an tremendous amount of
| further innovation and engineering (and investment of
| course). The new engine work alone SpaceX has done is a
| hufe deal and is what defines the envelope for the rest of
| the system.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| The point is, the archetypal inventor is someone who has a
| unique flash of insight that only they could have had. Your
| example is of something different: that with enough funding
| and smart people working on a problem, great things can be
| achieved. Elon didn't personally have almost any of the
| insights, but he did supply the vision and funding.
| gus_massa wrote:
| He supplied a lighting rod for negativity.
|
| The first few launches were very difficult. A NASA project
| with 10 crashes would have been destroyed by the press and
| congress.
|
| The superpower of Elon is to shield the technical team from
| the negativity, pipe it to null and post "close but no
| ciggar".
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| NASA's very early launches were hardly more reliable. But
| there was always an overlap with ICBM development and
| national defence. So reliability improved quickly, and
| one of the goals of the space program was to showcase
| that reliability.
|
| Once Apollo was running the success rate was 100%, with
| no boosters lost - an incredible achievement, not just of
| tech but of project management.
|
| NASA of the day didn't need shielding, because it was
| already doing the job with no excuses.
| db48x wrote:
| Well, only if you ignore Apollo 1. Overall Apollo was
| incredibly successful, but not 100%.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| Thanks - usually I understand what my downvotes are for,
| and stand by them. This instance would have left me
| puzzled without this explanation.
|
| I would have thought that a leader is judged by their
| results, and regardless of personal feelings for Elon -
| one can't argue that he managed to build SpaceX where
| many others would have failed. Could NASA have built
| something just as good? Possibly, but history doesn't do
| hypotheticals.
| gus_massa wrote:
| [I'm not sure that I understand the first part of ypur
| comment, but just in case, I didn't downvote neither of
| ypur comments.]
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| You know, on second thought: I don't recall Elon
| attracting all that much negativity before his recent
| escapades. Robert Downey Jr famously played Elon in Iron
| Man, and the audiences cheered. I think this is a case of
| "we were always at war with Eastasia".
| gus_massa wrote:
| I agree it's worse now. At that time the bad comments
| were like
|
| fake quote> _He is rich only because his father had an
| esmerald mine, and he can not even build rockets with
| 1960 technology._
| belter wrote:
| > Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented
|
| Why do you keep giving engineering credit to a Paypal
| Billionaire? By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do
| with BlueOrigin? I guess none other than opening a check
| book?
| yetihehe wrote:
| > By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with
| BlueOrigin?
|
| Why didn't BlueOrigin surpass SpaceX? Is it only a funding
| issue?
| asddubs wrote:
| wait, do you think the reason is that elon musk
| personally helped invent stuff?
| yetihehe wrote:
| No, but if it's not a difference of "Musk(programmer) vs
| Bezos(businessman)" I would like to know why other
| companies or leaders with a lot of money didn't have such
| success. Is it only a size of bank account? To me it
| looks like a ceo or a leader of company has more
| correlation with success than "just a lot of money".
|
| My take - a CEO that is technical enough to decide on
| technical matters in inevitable arguments over what
| direction to choose is better for tech company than a
| business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the
| short term".
| db48x wrote:
| Yea, there are hundreds or even thousands of
| billionaires. Only one of them has developed a successful
| orbital launch company. That's not exactly a high base
| rate.
| jeltz wrote:
| And how many have tried? Not more than 5 would be my
| guess. We do not have enough data to make a conclusion.
| db48x wrote:
| The ones who didn't try knew that they couldn't do it. We
| do have enough data to conclude that money alone is not
| enough.
| belter wrote:
| > a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical
| matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to
| choose is better for tech company than a business CEO
| that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".
|
| You do know Bezos has degrees in electrical engineering
| and computer science from Princeton unlike Musk, right?
| yetihehe wrote:
| I have a computer science degree too, but looks like it
| doesn't make me more successful. So I'm still asking what
| is the difference that made SpaceX more successful than
| BlueOrigin.
| belter wrote:
| Well to start with you should know Musk has never been a
| "Programmer"
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creator-says-
| elon-m...
| pookha wrote:
| This is the same argument people used against the Wright
| brothers that you're now throwing at Elon Musk (in a
| thread maligning the Wright brothers claim to
| fame)...Langley was a classically trained mathematician
| with associations to Harvard and the Naval Academy. He
| was one of the most sought after and decorated engineer's
| and astrologers (invented his own time system) and was
| given exclusive funding by the Smithsonian to solve
| flight. He lost to the Bicycle repair shop guys that hand
| rolled their own equipment on sandbars in North Carolina
| (who didn't have advanced degree's in engineering).
| belter wrote:
| You can do a lot with 38 Billion dollars of US Government
| money. It's a very Socialist thing to do: https://www.was
| hingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
| immibis wrote:
| Both Musk and Bezos are businessmen. There is still
| competition among businessmen to do business the best way
| - directing the right people to work on the right things.
| But don't confuse this with actually making the products
| themselves. One can be a good businessman or a bad
| businessman, but this has nothing to do with engineering.
|
| (Arguably, the best thing Musk did for SpaceX as a
| businessman was to delegate all the business to someone
| else. He tends to ruin companies where he does not.)
| jeltz wrote:
| Musk is likely a worse engineer than Bezos and less
| technical. So that is probably not the reason. What Musk
| instead is is an excellent salesman. But maybe he was
| just lucky. Whatever it was it was not engeeeing which is
| a big weakness of Musk.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Musk happened to hire better engineers and programmers I
| guess
| asddubs wrote:
| Bezos made some pretty technologically prescient
| decisions too, the obvious example being the API mandate,
| which set the ball rolling for AWS. I think leadership
| can be a factor, but to me what you're doing is a massive
| simplification. In any case, I don't think being a
| programmer would make me more qualified than anybody else
| to make good decisions for a rocket building company.
| emmelaich wrote:
| He seems to be the champion of using stainless steel for
| the rocket, which was a game changer.
| belter wrote:
| Not a novel idea. The Atlas Family of ICMBs, the
| Thor/Delta Rockets, The Space Shuttle External tank, The
| R7 Russian rockets and the N1 Moon Rocket. They all did.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think there is also a bifurcation to be had on inventions
| which take billions of dollars into a business to R&D and
| tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per test vs
| inventions one mildly wealthy (or less) average individual
| can reasonably cover the investment of. The former is less
| about the invention making and more about the funding
| gathering.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it
| also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for
| something for a very, very long time without anyone putting
| the pieces together._
|
| Perhaps invention is slightly different, but in the empirical
| sciences there's a bunch of stuff that occurred at roughly
| the same time:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
|
| Science and technology are closely related, as the latter
| builds on the former, and so it is often the case that
| sometimes a little bit of luck / timing determines who is
| "first", e.g.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray
| Zak wrote:
| I think we can say that a successful airplane was inevitable
| in the early 20th century because of the other work being
| done in the field at the time. Other designs were getting
| close, but didn't quite have the necessary combination of
| power to weight and lift to drag. The most important
| innovation from the Wrights was the realization that
| aerodynamic roll control was necessary; it's harder to say
| how many years would have been needed for someone else to try
| that.
|
| That's not to say the same thing is true for any other
| invention or technological advance.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I used to watch a show called Connections. Things can exist
| in other fields that cross over and make other fields
| absolutely ignite with interesting possibilities.
|
| SpaceX is taking existing tech and rebuilding it up from
| ground up principles. It is the method they are applying to
| all of his businesses. Get something working. Then go back
| and throw everything out until it stops working. Then put
| that thing back. Then throw out more. The idea is if you
| still work perfectly fine without something you did not need
| it. Following the optimization method of 'the most optimal
| thing is the thing that is not there.' It is what took Tesla
| from a bespoke 1-5 cars per year company to the capability to
| build thousands per week. It is a brutal painful process that
| works.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's increasingly debatable that the process actually does
| work.
| immibis wrote:
| The idea you are specifying is called Muntzing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing - named after a CEO
| who supposedly made the poorest TVs on the market, but also
| the cheapest. Which left him with lots of money to spend on
| marketing those poor-quality TVs to people who they would
| not work for, who had to pay for their own return shipping.
| coliveira wrote:
| The capability of building thousands of cars per week is
| quite old. You may be referring to EVs, but even in that
| category we have BYD that is knocking competitors out the
| park.
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the
| late Roman empire
|
| Archimedes even demonstrated the principle of heated water
| caising a sphere to rotate
|
| But there was little use for it, without substantial
| investment in other areas. Horses for land transportand human
| rowers for ships were just cheaper and more practical
|
| It would take another 1500 years before Watt found its use
| for a pump
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| FWIW, there was plenty of use for pumps earlier on - in
| mining. But muscle power, then water power, was sufficient.
|
| Part of the steam engine's success was how it contributed
| to itself - it helped mine coal that would fuel it, and
| that would fuel furnaces in which steel was made, some of
| that steel going into... making more engines - and all of
| that moved around by means of steam power.
|
| _*Factorio vibes intensify*_
|
| You had to have enough pieces together: demand for coal and
| steel and moving them distances, sustained long enough to
| exhaust simple options, and become a problem the steam
| engine could solve. It was then that the steam engine
| turned this into self-reinforcing loop, and kickstarted the
| modern world.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| Your discussion with DrF jogged my memory a bit. There
| was a discussion on this topic some time ago (I'm fuzzy
| on when) that went into detail about how there needed to
| be a specific use case and demand for this. I'm trying to
| remember the blog, but a search on HN yielded this:
| https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-
| wasnt-...
|
| I _think_ this is the blog in question, and the most
| relevant part. If something else comes to me, I 'll share
| it here.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That exponential character is what we are seeing with
| computers too. Better computers increase both the supply
| and the demand for even more.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| The steam engine came about due to the spread of
| shipworms. Ships need copper shielding against that, thus
| mining deep, thus industrial revolution. First comes the
| demand.
|
| Which came about by the merchant fleet of the British
| empire.
| bluGill wrote:
| > The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the
| late Roman empire
|
| So long as you don't also add the "useful" qualification.
| If you want useful steam engines you things that didn't
| exist then. The iron alloys available to the Romans didn't
| allow for useful steam engines. Even the first steam
| engines were only useful in deep coal mines (where fuel was
| practically free) which the Romans didn't have.
| lukan wrote:
| "The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the
| late Roman empire"
|
| I read here on HN that this might be not really true.
| Because the romans did not heavily invest into high
| pressure chambers, aka cannons, like it was done in medival
| times. You don't just need a metal pot to build a steam
| engine. They must be able to hold much pressure and if they
| don't, they explode.
|
| So the romans likely would have been able to make it work,
| but it would have required a significant investment - as
| they did not had experience in building pressure chambers.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > The tech necessary for steam engines
|
| They had basic concepts but could not have produced a steam
| engine that did useful work.
|
| The Archimedes device you mention (the aeolipile) was
| basically a kettle mounted on an axle that did indeed spin.
| But it had no way of building up pressure to the degree
| necessary to move something other than itself.
|
| The Romans probably didn't have good enough materials tech
| to build vessels that could hold sufficient pressure to do
| useful work. Early steam engines could explode
| catastrophically and they were built by cultures that had
| centuries of cannon-making experience behind them. The
| Romans also lacked a compelling application that would have
| driven tech development and didn't have the iron/steel/coal
| industry required to build railways, etc.
|
| It's telling that the first commercially viable steam
| engines were basically water pumps for getting water out of
| mines, and it didn't matter if they were massive and
| underpowered. It took another 60/70 years for the tech to
| improve enough to power vehicles.
| mr_toad wrote:
| I also doubt the Romans had tools that could have
| machined a piston with sufficient precision either.
| triceratops wrote:
| Relevant: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-
| roman-indus...
| desas wrote:
| There were 100s of Newcomen engines throughout Europe which
| were mostly used to pump water. They were being deployed
| ~50 years before Watt improved the design.
| Qem wrote:
| > The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the
| late Roman empire
|
| IIRC I read somewhere it depended on the previous
| development of firearms, as it allowed metalworking to
| advance enough to produce metal tubes with very smooth and
| regular bores, that avoid leaks, jamming and uncontrolled
| explosions, to be fitted with pistons. The Roman empire had
| no firearms.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| GP is talking about something else, and arguably in agreement
| with your view: for a technology to come about and _stick_ ,
| you need a perfect storm: all the pieces being available
| _and_ a source of continued demand for it. The former you
| need for an invention to be made; the latter you need for it
| to _survive_ - to continue being made and to spread
| worldwide.
|
| WRT. rocketry, this is a story of technology getting almost,
| but not quite there - it was all evolving at a rapid pace,
| until suddenly _demand disappeared_. It 's not that demand
| for rockets wasn't there at all - just not at the price point
| which designs from the 80s/90s commanded What Elon did with
| SpaceX, was to focus on dropping the price. That involved
| revisiting the reusable boosters idea, which didn't pan out
| then because they didn't have to worry about money as much.
| It got perfected and productized by SpaceX now, because it
| was a road to cheaper launches - and they got them cheap
| enough to meet the existing demand (and create more of it).
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Also for rocketry the established players didn't want to
| majorly reduce the cost because they had government
| monopolies. Innovators dilemma.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| This is why I say people that say private capitalism is what
| moves the world tech forward are wrong. From Rockets,
| Nuclear, Robots, Internet, Cars, Planes, Semi Conductors,
| Satellites all these came about from government investment in
| loss making technology or by heavily subsidizing the
| production for war until it reached profitability.
| marcusverus wrote:
| I mean, both have a big role to play. You mention rocket
| tech, which is a perfect example of the strengths and
| weaknesses of public and private enterprise.
|
| Public enterprise can be great because it enables societies
| to leverage huge amounts of capital (at one point, the US
| was spending 4% of GDP on the Apollo program each year--the
| equivalent of $1 Trillion/year today) to accomplish goals
| that are beyond the capacity of private industry at the
| time. It suffers from being totally divorced from the
| normal constraints of economy, and so tends to way
| overspend (4% of GDP is frankly _insane_ ) and to get stuck
| at local maxima (see SLS).
|
| Private enterprise is basically the opposite. It can never
| match the government in terms of spending big to pull tech
| forward by decades--the profit margin doesn't really work
| that way. But it lavishly rewards the efficient allocation
| of capital, which (so long as there is meaningful
| competition) creates a drive to constantly improve tech.
| It's painful to think about where rocket tech would be
| without the recent advances born of private capital!
| diego_moita wrote:
| > You can find endless examples once you start looking
|
| My favorite examples are gunpowder, the printing press.
|
| Both were known by the Chinese and Koreans for thousand years
| before the Europeans. However, it was the Europeans that
| began using gunpowder in handheld guns (Chinese used it for
| fireworks) and combined the printing press with metallic
| moveable types and oily ink, making it far more efficient.
|
| Also: how much James Watt improved the already existing steam
| engine.
| Manabu-eo wrote:
| > the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were
| directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though
| important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993.
|
| Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing
| rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump
| engines.
| plastic3169 wrote:
| My favorite is that luggage with wheels was invented in 1972.
| The tech was there already. We just waited for somebody to
| invent it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Did it wait for someone to _invent it_ , or for it to make
| economical sense to put this tech in that particular
| application?
| Zaiberia wrote:
| You can't little wheely luggage until it's little wheely
| luggage time?
| lukan wrote:
| Not on unpaved, bumpy roads.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| Nor if you have a class of low paid (and before that
| unpaid) people who carried luggage for travelers. There
| was a lot of social change in the US after the 1960's,
| and travel only became democratized recently.
| setr wrote:
| You have this in India today, yet wheeled luggage has
| completely displaced unwheeled in any airport
| msh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| A bag on wheels is also practical in rail or boat travel,
| which wasn't exactly an abode of the rich.
|
| Ever lugged a huge wheel-less piece of luggage around a
| big railway station? I have. It is hell.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think the difference is that flight opened up quick
| trips where you might want a bag with just enough
| clothing for a few days. I also think the 1970s also hits
| a point where peoples' clothing had become a good bit
| simpler. Wheeled bags shine in airports for carry on
| bags.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "I think the difference is that flight opened up quick
| trips where you might want a bag with just enough
| clothing for a few days."
|
| Traveling salespeople etc. would often go on relatively
| short trips, even in the steam engine era. We
| underestimate mobility of pre-WWII people by a lot...
|
| The point about simpler clothing is really interesting. I
| can imagine that this could be the crucial difference.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think there are numerous small changes that all come
| together at the same time. It wouldn't have taken much to
| build wheels into steamer trunks.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why wouldn't quick trips work on surface transport? Sure,
| it takes a long time to go _far_ - surely nearly nobody
| ever went from London to China and came back a week later
| until it was practical to do so on planes. But for short
| distances it still would have been practical. I'm
| guessing there were people going from London to
| Manchester for a few days well before the 1970s.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The railway companies in Britain built their own hotels.
| The first was in 1839:
|
| > The first railway hotels in London were built at
| Euston. Two hotels designed by Hardwick opened in 1839 on
| either side of the Arch; the Victoria on the west had
| basic facilities while the Euston on the east was
| designed for first-class passengers
|
| And in Manchester:
|
| > The Grand Junction Railway, Britain's first trunk line,
| was completed between Curzon Street railway station in
| Birmingham and Warrington Bank Quay railway station,
| Warrington, on 4 July 1837. Through trains began to
| convey passengers from the station to Birmingham, and a
| separate booking office and waiting room were provided.
| From 17 September 1838 there were through carriages to
| London Euston by some trains after completion of the
| London and Birmingham Railway in that year. This increase
| in long-distance services resulted in one of the first
| private railway hotels opening in Liverpool Road.
|
| Here it is: https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/tour
| s/tour1/area1pa...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_railway_station#Old_
| sta...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Liverpool_Road_r
| ail...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think you also need travel to be available for a class
| of people who are both expected to change clothes every
| day and did not have porters carrying their luggage.
| scythe wrote:
| Air travel is basically immune to terrestrial obstacles.
| You can fly over almost anything, even though you do have
| to worry about the weather.
| mcswell wrote:
| Not true about flying. My family was definitely middle
| class, and we made several trips on jet airplanes, along
| with many other non-upper class people, in the mid-60s.
|
| Although perhaps I misunderstand your point--if your
| point is about someone else carrying the bags, maybe. But
| if that's the case, then why restrict it to flying, as
| opposed to travel by train or car?
| dmbche wrote:
| 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,
| Hernandez 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 wrote:
| i guess the real invention for wheeled transportation is
| not wheels, but (flat) roads
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Plus draft animals capable of pulling large wagons.
|
| Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian
| civilizations in the new world, and poor llamas cannot
| cut it.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| They had giant sloths?
| nkozyra wrote:
| Well except they died out ~ 9,000+ years before the
| initial invention of the wheel.
| OJFord wrote:
| Wheels are hugely beneficial for human-powered
| transportation too though, well, such as the luggage
| example up-thread.
|
| It's thought the moyai on Easter Island were moved into
| place rolled on logs, they didn't have oxen or horses
| either, but rolling on logs or if they'd built a wheeled
| trailer make it much easier for a group of humans to move
| them without damage than just be dragging or rocking.
| dmbche wrote:
| To be clear south american civilisations had the wheel
| and used it for throwing pottery, for drills and many
| other uses different than transportation - it is also
| suspected that they used the same log method to move
| large objects. Just not a wheel-axle-bearing "vehicle"
| kragen wrote:
| I don't think any American civilizations had the potter's
| wheel.
| AngryData wrote:
| On cleared and mostly flat ground yes. But if you are
| going up any sorts of inclines human power doesn't really
| cut it over any real distances without adding mechanical
| assistance that slows everything way down. And on rough
| terrain its a wash even before you consider the
| difficulties in making wooden wheels that can survive
| off-road abuse for any length of time.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| On the contrary, you'll apreciate wheels more if you are
| your own source of motive power.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is certainly somewhat interesting that, unlike the
| Chinese, the Amerindians never used a wheelbarrow.
|
| https://www.wheelbarrows.co.uk/evolution-of-the-
| wheelbarrow/
| rafram wrote:
| > Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian
| civilizations in the new world
|
| Eventually. Horses only became extinct in the New World
| around 10,000 years ago -- somewhere between 15,000 and
| 6,000 years after humans arrived.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes, the horse is actually an American species that
| expanded into the Old World.
|
| The pre-Columbian civilizations (and by that I mean the
| highly organized socially stratified societies that we
| are aware of) only emerged several millennia after the
| paleo-Indians hunted horses to extinction, though.
| mr_toad wrote:
| You can't scale up a wheel on a children's toy and expect
| it to work on a loaded cart. It would just break.
| Cartwheels that will go the distance require fairly
| skilled carpentry.
| kragen wrote:
| Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans did have fairly skilled
| carpentry, though. They just didn't have cart wheels.
| Ray20 wrote:
| Perhaps it was precisely because they were not so
| skilled?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Carpentry is a pretty big field, so it is probably not
| right to say they were or weren't skilled.
|
| They didn't have the specific skill of making cart
| wheels.
| aqme28 wrote:
| 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.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I remember metal skates (steel perhaps) in the early
| seventies.
| JackFr wrote:
| 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.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| 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.
| mont_tag wrote:
| Perhaps the need was less pressing when airports were smaller
| and fewer people traveled.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| billy99k wrote:
| We don't really know this. People like this only come around
| once in a generation.
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I have this complaint about a lot of more modern history,
| which is that the idea of the great man theory is so
| abhorrent that some historians have started to treat the
| concept of free will as non-existent where the forces of
| history are so powerful things were all but inevitable.
| People are driven by economic, environmental, and
| societal factors. But sometimes there is an individual
| that makes things move one way or another.
|
| I usually like to take the example of WWI, it was
| probably going to happen regardless in Europe eventually.
| But King Wilhelm II was an individual that has specific
| psychological aspects that drove it to happen the way it
| did. A different king would not have created the alliance
| situation that made the specific powers fight on their
| specific side. If King Wilhelm didn't try and emulate and
| thus alienate England, we might have seen England and
| Germany against Russia and France.
| intalentive wrote:
| Why is great man theory "abhorrent"?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Part of it might be calling the most violent and
| murderous people in history "great".
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I really hate this take because it implicitly ignores the
| baseline murderous-ness of the systems and situations
| these leaders inherit. Nelson Mandela wasn't gonna rise
| to the top of the pile in 1920s Russia.
|
| Furthermore, the people who underpin various states and
| societies (and the cultures and movements that shape
| them) do ultimately choose who rules them. Leaders only
| have freedom of action within the window of what their
| political capitol affords them. The people, or even just
| the ones that call the shots (this should be a familiar
| concept if you've ever seen a TV show centered around a
| medieval royal family) very much do set that window.
| Grant and Eisenhower's "failure" to thoroughly exploit
| conquered territory would have made them unsuitable for
| further leadership in antiquity for that matter yet they
| were both more or less instantly elevated by the existing
| power structure and elected to the highest office.
| lupusreal wrote:
| This is a bad take because it comes from linguistic
| ignorance. The "great" here doesn't mean the person is
| wonderful with a kind soul and a benevolent impact. It's
| not "great" as an extra intense "good".
|
| It's great like a Great White Shark is great. Great like
| Great Britain is great. Large, impactful, encompassing. A
| person is said to be a "Great Person" if they are seen to
| have a disproportionately large impact on the course of
| history. It is this premise, of some individuals being
| able to have such disproportionate impacts (rather than
| everything being a product of the times) that certain
| philosophers and historians have objected to. It wasn't
| out of concern that we might be glorifying nasty people
| with the term; if that were it then we could simply
| change the terminology to "Impactful People" or something
| like that. Those who've lodged serious objections to the
| premise of great people would not be placated by this
| change in words.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Marx particularly (ironically?) hated it.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Incidentally I remember my history teacher commenting
| that even if Marx didn't exist at that time, communism
| would still be born around that time in history.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Marx himself would say so. Key to Marxism is studying
| history to come up with a scientific theory which
| predicts the future course of society. If individuals can
| change the course of history through shear force of their
| will, bending society in unpredictable ways to suit their
| individual fancy, that throws a wrench into it.
|
| But can anybody seriously say that if not for Napoleon,
| there surely would have been some other French general,
| inspired by Julius Caesar to conquer everything he could,
| who was simultaneously also a master tactician with
| enough skill to get as far as Napoleon did? I can buy the
| premise that somebody else in that political environment
| might have _tried_ , but to get so far and embroil most
| of the world in war as Napoleon did wasn't a
| deterministic predictable consequence of the
| circumstance. You can probably predict a civil war, but
| not the Napoleonic Wars.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| It is a bit funny when some historians describe "great
| man theory" as blatantly false, while warning that
| specific individuals are uniquely dangerous when
| commenting on ongoing politics.
|
| If "great man theory" is 100% false and each person is
| 100% replaceable with no change for historical events,
| why complain so much that $POLITICIAN is uniquely
| dangerous?
|
| (my opinion is that both individuals and trends matter,
| there are people that changed history, but power of
| geography/economy/technology is also great - for example,
| once nuclear weapons were discovered it had some
| consequences. And no individual can uninvent nuclear
| weapons.)
| Maken wrote:
| $POLITICIAN is just the visible face of a much larger
| movement, specially in democracy. But by being the public
| face,it also means that defeating $POLITICIAN is
| defeating his backing movement by proxy.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Extreme version of "great man theory" denialism claims
| that it does not matter even who wins elections or rules.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| One man dictators like Mao, Stalin or Hitler have huge
| impacts on history depending on their personal
| idiosyncrasies. Had any of those three died young,
| history would have been substantially different.
|
| Wars can also be decided my random misfortunes. If the
| 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler
| might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very
| different world.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Wilhelm II, as despicable as he was, really can't be
| majorly blamed for WWI. His ministers had arranged for
| him to be on vacation during the July crisis because they
| knew he wouldn't be tough enough, and when Serbia
| responded to the Austrian ultimatum, Wilhelm was
| convinced that this should be enough to avert a war.
| ghaff wrote:
| WWI seems like more of a slow motion train wreck than
| WWII does. There were so many pieces in motion even if
| Archduke Ferdinand's assassination (which came very close
| to not happening) precipitated it. Whereas while the
| aftermath of WWI planted the seeds for WWII, it seems a
| lot less inevitable.
|
| Total side-note, I've actually seen Serbia's basic FU
| response to Austro-Hungary in Serbia :-)
| dwighttk wrote:
| You just lay down a foundation and keep putting layers on
| top of that...
| otteromkram wrote:
| > at least here in the US
|
| I didn't realize that you spoke for everyone. Maybe you were
| taught that info by your instructor, but that doesn't mean
| everyone followed a similar format.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| They never said literally everyone. It's undeniably the
| rule but that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions.
| derekp7 wrote:
| 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.
| preciousoo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-no
| vember-190...
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-
| magazine/10-milesto...
| lupusreal wrote:
| In 1906, Santos-Dumont flew 220 meters for less than half
| a minute. In 1905, Wilbur Wright flew 38.9 km for more
| than 39 minutes.
|
| This isn't one of those cases, like light bulbs, where it
| can be reasonably debated who was first. The Wrights were
| in front of the competition by literal miles.
| brabel wrote:
| Not sure why you feel the need to point that out when I
| just listed some relevant facts about why Dumont was
| relevant to aviation history.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| This applies to "negative" inventions, too: Eugenics was a
| pretty favorably and openly discussed concept in the early
| 1900s (e.g. Winston Churchill was a pretty vocal proponent),
| but Hitler basically gets all the credit for the whole idea.
| tomxor wrote:
| :D thanks, you made me laugh.
|
| https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour-
| extras...
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, I'm pretty sure Eugenics was invented by Eugene,
| thus the name. Or it was a way to avoid needing to know
| people's names, because everyone would be named Eugene. :P
| pnut wrote:
| Thank goodness it's not "Eugene Torvalds" who made a
| kernel just for fun!
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| 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).
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| boringg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| boringg wrote:
| It is fundamentally about taking away individual
| achievement.
|
| Of course other people are involved - stating the obvious
| isn't enlightening. Individual merit, insight and
| achievement should absolutely be celebrated. This whole
| effort to say we'd be where we are as humans
| scientifically regardless of individual effort and
| intellect is shades of cultural revolution and 100%
| rewriting history.
|
| It's the equivalent of saying individuality isn't needed
| and it's 100% wrong. Recognize other contributors of
| course, but don't discount individuals.
| evilduck wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, this is true for the airplane, but it really doesn't
| apply to every invention.
|
| Some things only exist because a single person got too outside
| of the groupthinking, or decided to dedicate their life into
| making it.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Who really "invented" computers? Babbage? Alan Turing? Konrad
| Zuse? John Von Neumann? Mauchley & Eckert?
|
| Who invented calculus? Leibniz? Newton?
|
| Same goes to the Fast Fourier Transform, CRISPR-CAS9, etc.
| evgen wrote:
| Can you provide an example of this? There are a few
| inventions-via-serendipity (e.g. Teflon) where someone got
| lucky, but few that i can think of where the specific person
| who got lucky mattered. Kary Mullis and PCR maybe?
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Some examples from Deep learning:
|
| AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was
| there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training
| convnets on GPU's in 2009?
|
| OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was
| only OpenAI training larger and larger language models.
|
| TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman
|
| In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only
| happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence
| and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1
| person or group did not exist.
| somethingsome wrote:
| Il sorry to bomb your comment, but I saw on another
| thread that you followed CMU intro to DL and had a
| beautiful time doing all the homework.But I didn't find
| your contact info.
|
| Do you happen to still have the homework
| questions/solutions somewhere ?
|
| At the moment the new ones are locked behind CMU
| credentials.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The bicycle. It's a surprisingly recent invention despite
| its simplistic material and manufacturing requirements.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Surprisingly, there's also still no simple explanation
| for _why_ a bicycle works. It's easier to understand how
| a modern microprocessor works than a bicycle.
| nradov wrote:
| We've discussed bicycles before. The material is hardly
| simplistic. There wasn't much serendipity involved.
| Practical bicycles came soon after the necessary basic
| technology had been developed, including precision
| bearings and robust pneumatic rubber tires. This wasn't a
| case where we could have had bicycles a century earlier
| if someone had come up with the idea.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| "practical bicycles" is nebulous, vague, and always means
| whatever you want it to mean to claim to be right.
|
| Bicycles do not need precision bearings nor pneumatic
| tires, as proven by the fact that bicycles predate them
| by decades. Also radial style ball bearings were invented
| _for bicycles_. Bicycles were the catalyst for precision
| bearings, not the other way around. Similarly pneumatic
| tires were created _for tricycles_ (long after pedal
| bicycles were already invented)
|
| Yes we absolutely could have had 2 wheeled transportation
| centuries earlier. Roads, the actually necessary
| infrastructure, was long since a thing for carts and
| wagons.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless
|
| Perhaps you're right in a technical/technological sense. But
| there's a deeper question I think we need to explore: will we
| as American citizens be patriots? (where by patriots I mean
| simply people who _love their country and fellow countrymen
| /women_ and have a shared cultural identity).
|
| Brazil ought to be lauded for their fierce patriotism. Their
| insistence that Dumont is the _real_ inventor is _great_ - it
| means they care about their shared history and cultural
| identity. It 's part of how Brazilians as a people-group care
| about and love one another. US citizens ought to feel the same
| way about the Wright brothers. As a citizen myself, I'm proud
| to say that the Wright brothers were the first to fly an
| airplane that carried a human. It matters to me because this is
| my country. If you're a US citizen, it should matter to you
| too.
|
| --
|
| Zooming out a bit... A house divided against itself cannot
| stand. Love is what holds families together. To love family
| members is to care for and prefer them more than people outside
| the family -- that is a _good thing_. A strong family with
| strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the
| family.
|
| In the same way, a country divided against itself cannot stand;
| and _love_ is what holds countries together. To love fellow
| countrymen /women is to care and prefer them more than people
| outside the country -- that is a _good thing_. A strong country
| with strong love can be a strong resource to help people
| outside the country.
|
| We need that in the US (and many places in the West) again. TA
| isn't so much about who is "right" but the difference between
| Brazilian national identity and the USA (which used to have a
| strong national identity).
| umanwizard wrote:
| Can you explain from first principles _why_ you think it's
| important? National identity is a relatively recent concept
| so it's clearly not essential or fundamental to human
| culture. It's not clear to me why I should care more about
| people in New York (2000 miles away but part of the same
| geopolitical entity) more than people in Brazil.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > Can you explain from first principles why you think it's
| important?
|
| I take it as given that (a) individual human flourishing is
| an important and worthy goal, (b) love (seeking the good of
| others) and hard work are the principal means of attaining
| that goal, and (c) formal human institutions (like
| marriage, family, and country) are the best means of
| organizing the human relationships and activities that fall
| under [b].
|
| Given (a), (b), and (c), it follows that:
|
| - to promote the health and flourishing of those
| institutions is to promote human flourishing itself
|
| - thoughtfully managing shared values and expectations of
| members in those institutions promotes flourishing of the
| institutions
|
| - love and preference for other members of each institution
| promotes the health of its members and of the institution
| itself
|
| I also posit (but don't have the space/time to work out the
| reasoning) that just as individual people should not live
| for themselves only, each institution must not exist merely
| for its own sake, but also for the good of those outside of
| it; that its own internal health and cohesion is an
| important prerequisite for being able to effectively
| benefit the rest of society; and that institutions that
| exist solely for their own sake with zero outreach are
| unhealthy.
|
| However, to say that an institution is wrong or unhealthy
| because members of it love each other more than people
| outside the institution is to deny that the institution
| itself is a good thing. We intuitively know that healthy
| married people love each other more than others, and that
| healthy family members love each other more than others. In
| a healthy company, we work for the good of our own company
| first, not other companies. The same principle should apply
| to countries. To reduce the principle to a pithy saying:
| "Put your own [country's] oxygen mask on first."
|
| > National identity is a relatively recent concept
|
| I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion.
| Every successful society since ancient history, from local
| tribes to the great ancient empires to modern countries had
| (at a minimum) social cohesion, shared values, and a shared
| identity. Individual members of Visigoth and Viking tribes
| identified as _Visigoths_ and _Vikings_ and had a shared
| sense of identity; same with Greeks, Romans, Germans,
| French, English, Swedish, etc. The United States at its
| inception and for a long time afterwards was no exception.
|
| This doesn't mean we should be unfriendly and not care
| about others. Love is not a zero-sum game. Members of
| families that are affectionate to one another also feel
| very loving to people outside the family. The healthiest
| countries in the last 100 years were also some of the best
| international partners and best places to travel...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| This kind of patriotism makes little sense to me. It's like
| football hooligans fighting over their favorite sports teams.
|
| My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident of
| birth. I'll support my country when they do things I think
| are good. I'll support other countries when they do things I
| think are good. Supporting your own country even when they
| are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident
| of birth [...] Supporting your own country even when they
| are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.
|
| Would you say the same of your family?
|
| If a family member were doing bad things, I would still
| love them and be loyal to them. But I would show that love
| by confronting them thoughtfully, not rejecting the family
| entirely. In that sense, our mutual family membership could
| hopefully become a means of calling them back to their
| senses, especially if multiple family members are involved
| in talking to them over a period of time.
|
| > It's like football hooligans fighting over their favorite
| sports teams.
|
| That take trivializes human institutions in which we are
| members. These institutions ought to be taken as sacred.
| When they fall, we fall. (Not so with a sports team losing
| to another team :)
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Nations fall all the time. Humans go on. Most modern
| countries are not that old, because the previous
| countries fell. People are still around though.
|
| Plus: if your country goes bad, your best move might be
| to take your family and get the hell out of there. There
| are plenty of recent examples.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| A nation falling is a _big deal_. I 'm surprised at how
| you hand-wave it away.
|
| Yes, some falls were good. The falls of the Nazi Germany,
| the USSR, East Germany, and Nicolae Ceausescu were very
| good, primarily because those regimes oppressed their
| populations and murdered tens of millions of people. Yet
| many falls were bad. The fall of Germany to the Nazi
| party, the falls of Russia and China to communism, and
| any invasion and subjugation of a free and noble people
| is a bad thing.
|
| Let me ask you this rhetorically -- would you rather the
| USA be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, the Taliban,
| Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, or the US government?
| Imagine the consequences of each -- I think you'd agree
| that each is objectively better or worse than others for
| specific reasons. If such a choice were presented, it
| would not be morally or practically neutral - it would
| carry tremendous implications for human flourishing (or
| suffering).
|
| We ought to consider carefully and not hand-wave
| historical (or potential future) events that carry such
| massive consequences.
|
| > if your country goes bad, your best move might be to
| take your family and get the hell out of there
|
| Agreed, but that's a last resort. Many did so as Germany
| was falling to the Nazis, and as Russia and China were
| falling to communism. I have a friend whose parents
| escaped to Taiwan by holding on to the underside of a
| boat as it crossed the channel... I wouldn't tell them it
| wasn't a big deal. Many people who did so lost
| _everything_ except their immediate family in the
| process.
|
| So many people couldn't flee, though. And so much that
| had been built (people, skills, knowledge, families,
| institutions, relationships, social capital) was lost
| forever.
| lotharcable wrote:
| What made Wright Brothers the first, and not Santos Dumont or
| other people is that they not only created the first flying
| machine, they developed critical _PRINCIPALS_ of heavier then
| air flight that is used in every fixed wing aircraft since
| then.
|
| Without Wright Brothers' innovations controlled flight is
| simply impossible.
|
| Other people had things that looked similar to the Wright
| airplanes, but only the Wright airplane was able to take off,
| do figure 8s in the sky, and then land.
|
| For example the rest of the world was operating off of
| aerodynamic mathematics of lift and drag that was simply
| incorrect. The Wright brothers built the air tunnels and
| created the math for better ones that actually worked.
|
| The also figured out the principals to using rudders to counter
| adverse yaw in controlled flight. This is the tendency of the
| airplane to turn (yaw) against the direction of a turn.
|
| And there are a few things beyond that. Without this controlled
| flight is not possible. Without figuring these things out
| airplanes are not really possible.
|
| Now would of somebody else eventually figured it out?
|
| Sure.
|
| But it was the Wright brothers that did it first and that is
| the point. This is why they were able to create the first
| airplane and other people didn't. Even if they looked very
| similar it doesn't matter because they didn't incorporate the
| necessary features that made the Wright's plane work.
| eej71 wrote:
| The Wright Brothers biography by David McCullough does a
| great job of covering the details here.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| 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.
| christina97 wrote:
| Thanks ChatGPT.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| When will people realize that pasting markdown is a dead
| giveaway?
| kragen wrote:
| Anybody who publishes on GitHub, Reddit, or Stack
| Overflow is pretty familiar with some variant of
| Markdown. People have been accidentally posting Markdown
| on HN much longer than there have been LLMs.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| why would I write that myself when chatgpt can do it 10x
| faster?
|
| I knew there were several people working on the same
| thing as Newton at the exact same time. I didn't know the
| exact dates and their names.
|
| What would you do, Google it all? Good choice.
| zokier wrote:
| Why post at all if you don't want to write the comment
| yourself?
| grokys wrote:
| At least Leibniz is still famous for the biscuits
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz-Keks
| zoky wrote:
| 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).
| jshier wrote:
| Though only the Leibniz is named for the philosopher, the
| Newton is named for the town in Massachusetts.
| btilly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ~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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| 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!
|
| https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978
| glitcher wrote:
| 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!
| zeven7 wrote:
| Some things aren't like that. GR comes to mind. (Hilbert was
| working on it also, but only because he started as a
| collaborator of Einstein.)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's one of the reasons I disagree with NDT and other popular
| scientists that Newton was the greatest scientist. Einstein
| was singular in that respect that he was the only one even
| thinking about spacetime as a geometric entity. Calculus and
| gravity, were already all things others were working on and
| making similar strides. Newton just got there first and while
| he's definitely a unique genius and impressive in the breadth
| of things he accomplished, that takes away for me when
| comparing him with Einstein.
|
| I think his most unique work may have been the contributions
| to optics but stacked up against a fundamental description of
| what gravity and time are that completely changed our
| thinking on it... Not to mention that still to this day 100
| years later we're building machines to verify some of
| Einstein's predictions. Oh and he invented the idea of lasers
| despite not believing in quantum mechanics.
|
| Not to mention that Newton's foundational contributions to
| math and science stopped around 28 when he started focusing
| on alchemy and other things. By comparison Einstein kept
| making contributions to physics throughout his life and his
| contributions "stopped" when he focus on the grand unifying
| theory trying to bridge quantum mechanics and relativity, a
| problem still unsolved 70 years after his death despite an
| accelerating understanding and technology in the world of
| physics.
| necovek wrote:
| Not discounting Einstein's singular contributions, but he had
| help in putting Riemannian (also called Bolshai-Lobachevsky
| in other parts of the world ;)) geometry to use:
|
| > This idea was pointed out by mathematician Marcel Grossmann
| and published by Grossmann and Einstein in 1913.[7]
|
| (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)
| raattgift wrote:
| In most mathematical circles, Bolyai-Lobachevsky geometry
| is strictly a (family of non-Euclidian) hyperbolic
| geometry.
|
| Janos Bolyai, not Bolshai. And certainly in the 1820s-1830s
| he investigated the Euclidean parallel postulate, arriving
| at a hyperbolic geometry in which it does not hold true
| (i.e., initially close parallel lines diverge), and
| eventually studying geometries which take no position on
| the parallel postulate. Lobachevsky also independently
| arrived at a hyperbolic geometry, and continued develop a
| substitute postulate for the parallel postulate.
|
| However, all of the above is several long steps before
| developing _differential_ geometry with its inner products
| encoding angles and distances on the tangent spaces at each
| point on an arbitrarily curved smooth manifold of higher
| dimensions, and an even longer one from the _pseudo-_
| Riemannian manifold of 3+1d General Relativity. Although
| many hands contributed to the positive inner product ->
| non-degenerate inner product, the reason anyone was doing
| that was because of Einstein's work on gravitation (in turn
| provoked in part by Poincare's 1905 argument about Lorentz-
| invariance of the wave equation for gravitation, in the
| spirit of Special Relativity).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I believe that invention was a bit controversial, for some
| reason...
| oytis wrote:
| A lot of modern Germans seem to be very proud of it for
| some reason. Also Zuse's company existed long after the
| WWII.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I saw the replica of this in Berlin in the museum of
| technology a few months ago. Worth visiting if you are in
| town.
| hvs wrote:
| Because every computer record has a host of qualifiers on
| it (like "programmable", "fully automatic").
| spogbiper wrote:
| "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/
| cpach wrote:
| I guess that's why the saying is that "history is written by
| the victors".
| sebastian_z wrote:
| That is also the reason why patents are of limited duration.
| nkozyra wrote:
| 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.
| intalentive wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| This is classic survivorship bias. We don't know about the
| things that didn't get invented because someone somewhere
| didn't do a critical breakthrough, because those things don't
| exist. Therefore, it's easy for people to assume that
| everything eventually gets invented, and nothing really hinges
| on a single person.
|
| We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and
| thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but
| no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.
| ufmace wrote:
| > We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire
| and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier,
| but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the
| vision.
|
| No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other
| critical technologies that were necessary to make steam
| engines more than a toy.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-
| indus...
| ahtihn wrote:
| > We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire
| and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier
|
| My understanding is that no, it couldn't have happened at
| that time because metallurgy wasn't good enough at the time
| for anything beyond toys.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| It is nationalist. Type in "Hungarian inventions".
|
| You will see: computer (Neumann), holography, discovery of
| vitamin C, ballpoint pen, helicopter, electric locomotive,
| telephone exchange, Word and Excel, and so forth.
|
| I mean, I am Hungarian, so what? Why should I be proud "to be
| Hungarian" because those things were invented by Hungarians
| (outside of Hungary, mostly in the US I believe)? I don't get
| it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Relatedly, who invented the television? Marconi or Baird?
| knicholes wrote:
| Neither. Farnsworth did. Maybe you're asking about the radio,
| was it Marconi or Tesla?
| figomore wrote:
| Also Roberto Landell de Moura
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| And John Logie Baird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lo
| gie_Baird#First_public_...
| upofadown wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I"m starting to wonder when, if ever, patents did _not_ hinder
| technological advancement on the net.
| kube-system wrote:
| When the development of the innovation requires a bunch of
| up-front capital.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| ycombinatornews wrote:
| 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 )
| adev_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Ellehammer
| mkl wrote:
| See also New Zealand's Richard Pearse, who achieved powered
| flight either slightly before or after the Wright Brothers
| (definitions and accounts vary). He wasn't into fame or being
| first or self-promotion, so the records and lack thereof are a
| bit frustrating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
| troyvit wrote:
| There's a great No Such Thing as a Fish podcast episode that
| talks about him: https://audioboom.com/posts/8641985-no-such-
| thing-as-a-honey...
| weeksie wrote:
| The Kiwis too have their own "invented the airplane" guy
| (Pearse?) Seems a lot was happening at that point in history.
| Nursie wrote:
| And in New Zealand you may credit Pearse -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Same thing with the internet, a dozen countries claim they
| invented it.
|
| Thanks to a mix of chauvinism and great-man-theory, we often
| forget that science is an international, collective and
| incremental effort.
| throw0101c wrote:
| There's an article that goes over various claims:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 1907 in France (by a Brazilian) vs 1903 in the USA
| newsuser wrote:
| Also, if we are talking X-rays, in Ukraine it is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Puluj, not Rontgen. Although,
| to his credit, the latter apparently did cite Puluj when using
| the X-ray emitting Puluj Lamp (Rontgen attended his lectures
| after all).
| Beijinger wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
| s_dev wrote:
| Who broke Engima -- the German encryption used during WWII?
|
| Polish mathematicians.
|
| Depends on who you want to credit I suppose. Such huge tasks are
| usually accomplished in bits by many people.
| Symbiote wrote:
| That one is a little different, as both Poland and the UK
| considered breaking the Enigma machine a state secret until the
| 1970s.
|
| That Polish mathematicians broke the codes, and shared this
| information with the British, is taught in the UK.
|
| My understanding (from school in England) is the British
| codebreakers' contribution was to scale up the scale of the
| codebreaking, by using lots of machines and their own
| mathematical innovations.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Wow, that's more of a rabbit hole than I realized. There are more
| claims to first flight than are even listed in these threads.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...
| Aardwolf wrote:
| This one is very steampunk (and batman) like! It's also
| literally steam powered
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Avion_III
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| 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
|
| )
| tdullien wrote:
| And Konrad Zuse invented the computer.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| and Karl Benz the car.
| akie wrote:
| And they did! They both literally did.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| 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 Offentlichkeit brachte. Demo-
| Leiter Douglas Engelbart gilt seitdem als Erfinder des immer
| noch genialsten und griffigsten Eingabegerats 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 fruhen 70er-Jahren wurde
| sie zusammen mit Telefunken-Rechnern verkauft und in der
| Praxis eingesetzt, und mindestens ein Exemplar hat in einem
| Museum uberlebt."
|
| 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."
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Bl%C3%A9riot
| conartist6 wrote:
| They didn't even mention the name "Lilienthal" who the Wright
| Brothers knew to have flown a heavier than air craft before they
| did...
| nashashmi wrote:
| In other places, Abbas ibn Firnas is taught as the inventor of
| flight (glide) in 9th century. https://mideast.unc.edu/flight-of-
| fancy/.
| delichon wrote:
| When I was a kid I was a big Wilber and Orville fan, but then
| read a story about Gustav Whitehead, and was flabbergasted that
| I'd been lied to. I've never quite trusted teachers or historians
| since ... so it was an excellent lesson.
| bane wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > They contracted out the work, with specifications.
|
| No, they designed the engine and hired a machinist (Charles
| Taylor) to make it.
| bane wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| > But Taylor was hired to do it as an employee.
|
| I think that is overly reductive. Regardless of if
| someone is paid for a thing, the creation is still
| theirs.
|
| I have been paid to solve problems, but the solution was
| my creation.
| mulmen wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.baesystems.com/en-us/definition/what-is-swap-c
| jshier wrote:
| 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.
| OnACoffeeBreak wrote:
| Tangential to this... Wright brothers lived and worked in Ohio,
| but the first flight happened in North Carolina due to its wind
| conditions and soft sand. In the early 2000's (if I remember
| right) North Carolina came out with a license plate with the
| image of the Wright Flyer and a slogan of "First in Flight". Ohio
| then came out with a license plate with "Birthplace of Aviation".
| A bit more on this here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#State_rivalry
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Somebody at WaPo taking a stand against Bezo's "America, liberty,
| innovation" memo
| kshahkshah wrote:
| I highly recommend this book: Sky High!: A Soaring History of
| Aviation especially for those with children as a fun illustrated
| history of the individuals and their contributions to making
| modern aviation possible today. Suffice to say and as other
| commenters said, no one individual or pair of individuals made
| the airplane.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| You might even say that George Cayley invented powered flight a
| century earlier. He just couldn't find a motor light enough to
| actually implement it.
| bisRepetita wrote:
| Then I'll claim Leonardo da Vinci almost did it with his aerial
| screw in the 15th century ;)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw
| desdenova wrote:
| The wright brothers invented a slingshot, not an airplane.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >"They didn't take off on their own," said Marcio Bhering
| Cardoso, the former director of the Brazil's national aerospace
| museum. "They needed help."
|
| Let's also discount all rocket launches near the equator, as this
| is also cheating.
| jstanley wrote:
| The inventor of the aeroplane (to the extent that the question
| even has an answer) doesn't depend on what country you're in!
|
| How many legs does a dog have if I call it's tail a leg?
| pjbk wrote:
| 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
| nailer wrote:
| > Brazilians hear a different story: that the true inventor of
| the airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont -- commonly described here
| as "the father of aviation."
|
| Also watch enthusiasts - one of Cartier (who invented the pilots
| watch) models is the Santos Dumont.
| mannykannot wrote:
| In the US, the Smithsonian Institution claimed that Samuel
| Langley, not the Wrights, was the inventor of the airplane. His
| Aerodrome #6 flew nearly a mile in 1896, but this machine was not
| really controllable, and Langley's subsequent prototypes
| regressed, ending with an ignominious flop into the Potomac river
| on December 8, 1903, nine days before The Wrights' successful
| tests at Kitty Hawk.
|
| Not coincidentally, Langley was the secretary of the Smithsonian,
| and in addition, his claims were promoted by Glenn Curtiss in his
| attempts to overthrow the Wright patents. As the dispute heated
| up, the Wrights loaned the flyer to the London Science Museum,
| where it remained until after Orville's death.
| culi wrote:
| It feels like every country has it's own "we actually invented
| airplanes" story. Growing up I heard form my parents, who are
| from a little-talked about country, claim that their country
| was the one that invented airplanes.
|
| I think it's similar to the lightbulb. The availability of
| certain other technologies allowed for an explosion in
| invention leading to many simultaneous "discoveries" of the
| same basic inventions. In the US it seems we prioritize the
| documentation through the patent system to ascribe credit
| archeantus wrote:
| I was just at the Outer Banks and I walked through the
| memorial/park they have there. It was very well done and I left
| feeling very inspired and motivated.
|
| Then I went home and watched a documentary explaining all the
| stuff that happened after their success at Kittyhawk. Pretty sad
| that they took the patent/scarcity approach and stopped
| innovating. It was a cautionary tale to me to never let your foot
| off the gas once you've found something that works.
| brolumir wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I do agree that declaring the race suddenly over with a
| man on the moon was a case of taking the ball and going
| home.
|
| See, I would characterize this differently-- after the US
| reached the Moon, Russia pretty much gave up-- gave up on
| the N1, Zond, etc.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > 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?
|
| I was talking about post-1970 stagnation.
|
| Russia basically scaled everything waaaay back post 1970.
| You have Venera as a significant first/win, parity for a
| little while on Mars, and then the US unrivaled in the
| outer solar system.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| Both sides grossly overbuilt their nuclear missile
| capabilities. The maintenance costs forced them into
| partial disarmament treaties in the 80s and 90s.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| It's just the morphogenetic field channeling things from the
| akashic records. It's all 'in the air'. Just need to have the
| right antennas :)
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Best answer possible - too bad they couldn't align better in
| the long run (ie for humanity).
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Thanks.
| outside1234 wrote:
| If wasn't for all of the nukes involved behind the scenes, I'd
| say we all won.
| wil421 wrote:
| 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.
| motus2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Kotelnikov is known to the Wikipedia generation, since he's
| mentioned in the sampling theorem article.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| When you take a non-zero-sum game and insist it's zero sum, you
| get subjective winners and losers.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jldugger wrote:
| Relatedly, just listened to one of the oldest Engines of Our
| Ingenuity episodes: 32 -- Wright and Langley.
|
| > Curtiss went to work, strengthening the structure, adding
| controls, reshaping it aerodynamically, relocating the center of
| gravity -- in short, making it airworthy. In 1914 he flew it for
| 150 feet, and then he went back and replaced the old motor as
| well. On the basis of Curtiss's reconstruction, the Smithsonian
| honored Langley for having built the first successful flying
| machine.[...] In 1942 the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles
| Abbot, finally authorized publication of an article that clearly
| showed the Langley reconstruction was rigged.
|
| https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/32
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| hathawsh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| See "The Wright Brothers as Engineers" by Quentin Wald
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-
| Appraisal-E...
| DistractionRect wrote:
| You can actually formally do just that, HN maintains a
| highlights list which you can email them nominations for:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
| MostlyStable wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Really? :(
| AceyMan wrote:
| 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_.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The 1903 Flyer did have one defect - it was unstable in
| pitch. It required an active hand on the pitch control.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| 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.
| jshmrsn wrote:
| This is true again for the most advanced fighter aircraft,
| except the active hand is now a computer.
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| hugs wrote:
| "...someone else in the world would have done it within 10
| years." That is arguably true of every invention ever
| invented.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It is, and being aware of that is crucial in having the
| right perspective on inventors (and same is true about
| scientific discoveries). That is, they're not some
| superhuman geniuses so far ahead the rest of humanity,
| that through sheer power of their minds, they can wrestle
| breakthroughs from the hands of gods. No, they're just
| specialists who were at the right time and place, and had
| the right experience, to be the first to pluck an
| invention that was already ripe for the taking.
|
| This isn't to diminish the value of inventors. Even as
| all discoveries are tiny increments on top of prior work,
| so tiny they quickly become apparent to many people in a
| given field, it still takes exceptional skills, knowledge
| and smarts to be the first (or one of the firsts) to make
| that increment. That is worthy of respect. But at the
| same time, inventors are not critical to inventions - if
| not for the inventor we know, someone else would've done
| the same within months or years.
| rexer wrote:
| > being aware of that is crucial in having the right
| perspective on inventors.
|
| Can you go a step further on why the right perspective
| here is important?
|
| Feels like you're telling a kid Santa Claus doesn't
| exist. Why kill the magic?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Feels like you're telling a kid Santa Claus doesn't
| exist. Why kill the magic?_
|
| Because lying to your kids will only cost you their
| trust, however letting adults believe in magic leads to
| them making bad decisions with tragic consequences to
| themselves, their families, communities and countries.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > an invention that was already ripe for the taking.
|
| Powered, controlled flight was clearly not ripe for the
| taking at the time the Wrights embarked on solving it.
| See the list of their accomplisments I posted. They had
| to get _all_ of them right to solve the problem. Which is
| another reason why I 'm not buying what the pretender
| defenders contend.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| 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!
| ant6n wrote:
| We have no problem with drive and interest, but I wish we
| had half the funding of the scammers!
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| connicpu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not quite. The propeller and control surface configuration is
| now reversed from what was used on the original Flyer.
| robocat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| db48x wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The skids were for landing. I don't recall them ever
| taking off using the skids.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| fumufumufumu wrote:
| No idea if this is trustworthy but a documentary on
| Westinghouse claimed that Edison took credit for all of
| his employee's inventions. Westinghouse did not.
|
| https://youtu.be/wuqodfC9WwY?t=3790
| WalterBright wrote:
| Edison gets credit for inventing the inventing business.
|
| The Wrights get credit for the first directed research
| and development project. (The Apollo project took that to
| an extreme!)
| kragen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These days, gliders/sailplanes are commonly launched using
| winches or tow planes.
|
| Motor gliders self-launch.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Or into an intense headwind.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| evanfrommaxar wrote:
| They were also the first ones to truly understand the
| relationship between pitch, roll & yaw.
| elchananHaas wrote:
| As with many inventions, the Wright brothers weren't the first
| inventors of the airplane but the last ones. Everyone else
| built off them.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> All modern aircraft can trace their lineage back to the 1903
| Flyer, and no other claimant.
|
| All heavier-than-air powered aircraft. Balloons and unmanned
| gliders have a different history, them having existing long
| before the 1900s.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > 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.
| wtallis wrote:
| "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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| ant6n wrote:
| What's also interesting is the story after 1903. The big
| aircraft builder today isn't the Wright Company, it's Boeing
| and Lockheed Martin. The Wright brothers got embroiled in
| patent lawsuits (in particular against Curtiss), instead of
| continuing their developments. They eventually won, but Wilbur
| died in 1912 (possibly related to all the traveling done as
| part of the patent fights).
|
| Actually, initially they even fought to have people believe in
| their success. They weren't that great at public relations, and
| it took a while for people to believe they had a working
| airplane.
|
| There was also a feud with the Smithsonian. Until the forties,
| the Smithsonian considered a competing aircraft to be the first
| airplane (also related to Curtiss). In 1948 the Wright estate
| sold the first plane to the Smithsonian for a dollar, but the
| agreement stipulated that
|
| "Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any
| museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for
| the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or
| its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a
| statement or label in connection with or in respect of any
| aircraft model or design of earlier date than the 1903 Wright
| Aeroplane, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of
| carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."
|
| I guess this partially explains why the Americans only know
| about the Wright brothers as the original inventors of the
| airplane, as opposed to various national heroes in other
| countries.
|
| Oh an btw, talking about companies. The company the Wright
| brothers founded still exists - it's now Curtiss-Wright, I
| guess Wright eventually merged with their worst enemy (and a
| bunch of other companies).
|
| Too bad the Wright brothers didn't continue their developments
| as successfully as they started, and struggled to make it big
| on top of their invention. At least they got the recognition
| eventually.
|
| Btw, the Smithsonian has a cool exhibit on the Wright brothers,
| really encourages to you read up on them. [1]
|
| [1] e.g. here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Wilbur tied of typhoid contracted from bad food.
| andikleen2 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/ewright.htm
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.li
| braries.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."
| WalterBright wrote:
| Thanks for the information. The bottom line was the
| Wrights needed a considerably bigger wing than that
| predicted by Lilienthal's numbers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Fun fact: multiple pretender defenders have attempted to prove
| their case by building a sort of replica based on very
| incomplete drawings/photos, and proved they would fly. Never
| mind they increased the wing area, installed modern flight
| controls, and used a modern engine and propellor.
|
| The Smithsonian's version of the Langley flyer is a hilarious
| example of this kind of fraud.
| basisword wrote:
| >> If you look at other contenders, they were all lacking these
| points.
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong but that's not really proving your
| point.
| amrocha wrote:
| If you postfacto cherry pick the criteria by which to credit
| the inventor of a plane then yes, the wright brother
| unequivocally invented the plane.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's not hard to pick out the factors that enabled their
| success. Multiple breakthroughs were needed. What is hard is
| to find convincing proof that anyone beat them to it.
| amrocha wrote:
| The Wrights were successful and influential, yes.
|
| But they were not the first. Unless you cherry pick
| criteria to disqualify everyone else.
|
| Which is what you're doing.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The amount of documentation provided by the Wrights makes
| denial of their claim to being the first tauntamout to
| Moon landing denialism. Even several years later and with
| the benifit of knowing of the Wright's innovations,
| Santos-Dumont was barely able to get off the ground for a
| few hundred meters while the Wrights were flying tens of
| kilometers.
| brudgers wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Taylor_(mechanic) needs
| to get more credit for designing and building the engine in the
| Wright Flyer.
| m463 wrote:
| Nobody thinks of folks like the guy holding the camera, or
| the sherpas, or...
| sitkack wrote:
| I now think of myself as being the lucky one who gets to be
| at the right place and the right time, experiencing the act
| of creation is a gift from everything and everyone else
| that helped make it possible.
| pig_dog wrote:
| Beat the paywall link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250324104124/https://www.washi...
| layman51 wrote:
| The way the headline is written reminds me of a popular theory in
| Mexico that Thomas Alva Edison was born in Zacatecas State in
| Mexico.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| In Rissua Alexander Mozhaysky sometimes considered an inventor of
| the airplain or at least mentinoed alongside Wrigth brothers when
| aviation history is discussed:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Mozhaysky
|
| IMHO arguing about who was the first it's good to keep in mind
| that: 1. inventions don't happen in a vacuum - they rely on the
| work of predecessors 2. some inventions/discoveries are mande by
| different people/teams independently around the same time.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Shout out also to Lyman Gilmore, a resident of Grass Valley, CA
| who had a slightly plausible claim to first powered flight in May
| 1902. No one takes the claim too seriously but the guy did have
| some interesting early aviation experiments.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman_Gilmore
| randunel wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traian_Vuia
| toasterlovin wrote:
| I think a separate and (to me, at least) more interesting
| question is why the US seems to have been (and is still now) so
| good at commercializing and deploying new technologies.
| lsh123 wrote:
| https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_...
| cubefox wrote:
| Similar: Who invented the automobile, telephone, computer? The
| answer likely depends on your country of origin.
| Animats wrote:
| There were many pre-airplane aircraft.[1] Many people built
| gliders, and some of them worked. There were attempts at powered
| flight using steam engines (too heavy), clockwork (not enough
| energy storage), and rubber bands (well, why not, it works at toy
| size).
|
| The real insight of the Wright Brothers was to focus on stability
| and control. Lilienthal got this - he flew about 2,000 glider
| flights, before dying in a crash before he got to power. Langley
| (NASA Langley is named after him) was trying for inherently
| stable aircraft rather than controllable ones. That's quite
| possible, but add too much stability and you can't maneuver much.
|
| Somebody was going to succeed at this by the early 1900s.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| New Zealand did it first!
|
| https://vimeo.com/ondemand/forgottensilver
| aj7 wrote:
| Brings to mind Feynman's takedown of the Brazilian educational
| system in the 60's.
| fabiofzero wrote:
| I believe Santos Dumont did it because: 1. Spite 2. He was a much
| cooler person
|
| The US has claimed much more for much less in the past don't @
| me.
| jeleh wrote:
| The truth is: We will never know for sure.
|
| Have a look at the German aviation pioneer "Gustav Weisskopf" aka
| "Gustave Whitehead":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead
| tdiff wrote:
| I think there is countless number of similar cases. One I
| recently came across was what is called Raman spectrometry in a
| large chunk of the world, but is still called "combinational
| scattering of light" in Russia after the term used by Russians
| Landsberg and Mandelshtam, who are believed to have independently
| discovered the same, may be even by tiny fraction of time
| earlier.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Landsberg#Discovery_of...
| teleforce wrote:
| Once upon a time I was sharing a lab with Brazilian students in
| France. Some of them are doing aerospace engineering degree and I
| asked who are their potential employers in aerospace industry
| expecting the normal suspects of Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin
| or Dassault Aviation. Casually, however, they mentioned Embraer
| as the potential employer and according to them it's one of the
| largest aeroplane manufacturers globally which is based in Brazil
| [1]. To be honest I've to double-check the name and they're not
| wrong.
|
| [1] Embraer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer
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