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.
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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.
"...someone else in the world would have done it within 10 years."
That is arguably true of every invention ever invented.
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.
> 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.
To expand on that a bit, the Wrights clearly needed to solve multiple basic problems in order to produce a working airplane. To do this, they first identified the problems, then conducted a directed research and development program to solve them, one by one. Having solved them, they combined the results into a working airplane.
Nobody else was doing that at the time.
Without the Wrights, individual inventors might each solve one of the problems independently, and then a later individual puts it together.
The Wright approach was itself fundamentally innovative.
Agreed. It is a flaw of the media and human psychology that we shine the spotlight disproportionately. The media is almost always a caricature of reality. Scientific journals provide a more realistic view of innovation as an incremental process without as much hype.
> 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?
> 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.
Not to mention that clarifying this can lead to increased motivation to learn and discover stuff, as kids won’t think that if they are not geniuses they shouldn’t even try to create something new.
While I do agree this is the case for flight, I think saying EVERY major invention is not correct, or possibly not correct.
It's impossible to know how many people died shy of a breakthrough they were working on, that never was realised.
Who knows, maybe some materials genius choked on a pineapple two months before the breakthrough that could have given us transparent aluminium!
Sapphire is transparent aluminum. Already used in semiconductors and consumer goods.
Sapphire is aluminium oxide. Not aluminium.