To be fair to the Wright brothers, there was a lot of competition and it was almost all terrible. Flight isn't gliding. Flight needs to be sustained, controlled

To be fair to the Wright brothers, there was a lot of competition and it was almost all terrible. Flight isn't gliding. Flight needs to be sustained, controlled, and powered. Lots of people were creating human sized gliders that were kinda sorta powered and/or kinda sorta controlled, but not quite and certainly not enough for any kind of safe or reasonable transport. The best knowledge of aerodynamics we had back then was via Otto Lilienthal (who died experimenting with powered flight), which simply wasn't good enough. While the Wrights had many innovations, it was probably the wind tunnel they built to learn more about wing and propeller design that gave them the upper hand. Before this everyone was just guessing at what a wing should actually look like and those who guessed closely were still guessing and couldn't optimize the solution. https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html At the end of their 1901 wind tunnel tests, the Wright brothers had the most detailed data in the world for the design of aircraft wings. In 1902, they returned to Kitty Hawk with a new aircraft based on their new data. This aircraft performed much better than the 1901 aircraft and lead directly to the successful 1903 flyer. Results of the wind tunnel tests were also used in the design of their propellers.