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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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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
)
If you're French, it's Clément Ader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader
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.
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
Also, if we are talking X-rays, in Ukraine it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Puluj, not Röntgen. Although, to his credit, the latter apparently did cite Puluj when using the X-ray emitting Puluj Lamp (Röntgen attended his lectures after all).
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...
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:
This farmer in New Zealand also apparently invented powered flight first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
There's an article that goes over various claims:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...
And in New Zealand you may credit Pearse - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
The Kiwis too have their own "invented the airplane" guy (Pearse?) Seems a lot was happening at that point in history.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
New Zealand did it first!
They didn't even mention the name "Lilienthal" who the Wright Brothers knew to have flown a heavier than air craft before they did...
I was a young teen in Brazil in the 70's. And yes, when it came to first powered flight, it was, "what? The Who Bros.? Everyone knows it was Santos-Dumont!". And this was settled, and impervious to any argument. It wasn't really about who flew first. It was a cultural phenomenon, and my first clue that history is all about who writes it, and why. (This phenomenon was satirized in the original Star Trek series, which had a running gag involving Mr. Chekov and his alternate histories. Gulf of America, anyone?)
BTW WaPo, neither the Wrights or Santos-Dumont "invented" the airplane. As with so many of these things there were many contributors. Otto Lillienthal, who the Wrights credited as an inspiration (and who as the first plane crash fatality?) had already flow many times. Even Da Vinci explored the idea.
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.
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.
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...
The wright brothers invented a slingshot, not an airplane.
> 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.
In other places, Abbas ibn Firnas is taught as the inventor of flight (glide) in 9th century. https://mideast.unc.edu/flight-of-fancy/.
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
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.
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.
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.