6 ms·

The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?

36 points by saastring 5y ago

redis_mlc 5y ago
The article misses a couple of foundational things the Wright Brothers accomplished: - built one of the first wind tunnels, and published the most accurate performance data in the world: https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/results.html https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/results.html - built one of the first aero engines, and first using aluminum: https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/online/fly/1903/engine.cfm https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/onlin... The above items are simply amazing, and shows how the Wright Brothers couldn't be denied. (You can see later "aero engines" in the Hiller Museum in San Carlos (near SF) that can't even carry their own weight.) It's true that the brothers weren't killed while flying, but Orville was seriously injured crashing in 1908, and his passenger died from a head injury. Source: commercially-rated pilot, study aerodynamics.
WalterBright 5y ago
> The brothers were not the first to try to build a flying machine. They were the first to achieve controlled, powered flight. An overlooked, but crucial, part of their achievement is they developed the first mathematical theory of propellers. It enabled designs that were 90% efficient, about double that of other experimenters. This, of course, nearly doubled the effective horsepower of their engine. This is a major reason why the other pretenders to first flight failed. They simply didn't have the power/weight needed to fly, and the Wrights did. Where the Wrights goofed was in putting the elevator in front. They did this for good reason (hoping it would make it easier to recover from a stall). Unfortunately, it caused severe pitch instability making it hard to control and the Wrights were lucky to live through early flights.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  Yeah flying wasn't hard. Controlling it was hard. Wright got a lot of things right. They believed in flying skill.. that we must learn how to fly like a bird learning how to fly their whole life. They were also lucky with no major injury (at least one of the brothers wasn't) and had some family wealth IIRC.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right, as Burt Rutan, among many others, has demonstrated [1]. As with the conventional rear stabilizer/elevator combination, part of it must either be fixed or function as if it is fixed by augmentation with centering devices such as springs or balance tabs, and the forward surface must have an angle of incidence greater than the rear one (longitudinal dihedral.) I recall reading somewhere that most of the Wright's competitors (maybe not Lillenthal) imagined flying to be like boating, but the Wrights realized that it would require more-or-less continuous input from the pilot to stay in control. I wonder if their profession as manufacturers of bicycles predisposed them to this insight. [1] https://www.flyingmag.com/photo-gallery/photos/awesome-airplanes-burt-rutan/ https://www.flyingmag.com/photo-gallery/photos/awesome-airpl...
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right, as Burt Rutan, among many others, has demonstrated [1]. As with the conventional rear stabilizer/elevator combination, part of it must either be fixed or function as if it is fixed by augmentation with centering devices such as springs or balance tabs, and the forward surface must have an angle of incidence greater than the rear one (longitudinal dihedral.) You're not wrong but nobody knew this in 190x nor could it have been reliably predicted because most of our knowledge about how low pressure gasses flow over surfaces in unconstrained environments (i.e. the atmosphere) comes from aviation which didn't yet exist in 190x.
    - mannykannot 5y ago
      Well, you can use models and wind tunnels, which, as Walter alludes to, the Wrights, unlike many of their competitors, did. The Wright Flyer was not airworthy by modern standards, but it served their purpose, which was to validate their approach and establish precedence. The state of aerodynamics in 190x was more advanced than I suspect you imagine, with Lanchester on the right track in thinking about vorticity. Here's an interesting article on the divide between theorists and practitioners (which the Wrights partially, but not completely, bridged - and the theorists were evidently not all communicating with each other, either), and it also mentions the flawed assumption, of flying being like boating, that I mentioned in my earlier post. https://www.aerosociety.com/media/4846/fw-lanchester-and-the-great-divide.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/4846/fw-lanchester-and-the... It also shows that Lanchester, regardless of his theoretical chops, was not a successful airplane designer! He comes across as putting too much emphasis on how he thought things should be.
bumbada 5y ago
The Wright brothers did not create from the void, they copied lots of things from other innovators, specially Otto Liliental, whom they admired a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal This is important because, for example they did not invent ailerons, but blended the wing and constant litigation from their patents block all progress in aviation in the US for a long time because they wanted to take possession of the inventions others have created(like ailerons) and became a monopoly. Only the war and the US gobertment intervening did stop the blocking.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  The Wrights' innovations are: 1. first mathematical propeller theory combining blade element theory with momentum theory, producing 90% efficient propellers 2. first lightweight aviation engine 3. first 3-axis control system 4. first use of wind tunnel to evaluate wing design of area, aspect ratio, airfoil section and tip shape 5. first research and development program using a series of prototypes to test each feature 6. correctly identifying that control was the primary problem 7. correctly identifying that an airplane must bank in order to turn 8. correctly identifying "adverse yaw" and the rudder as solution
Stratoscope 5y ago
One of the many cool things NASA did with the Ingenuity helicopter was to obtain a small patch of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flyer and tuck it under the solar panel. So not only did the Wright Brothers achieve the first controlled powered flight on Earth, but in a real way they also took part in the first flight on Mars.
a3n 5y ago
Boulton and Watt would be an even older O.G. startup, with Boulton as the business founder and Watt the technical founder. They formed their partnership on Watt's improvement over Newcomen's steam engine, used to drain water from mines. They then expanded to other applications for steam engines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulton_and_Watt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulton_and_Watt https://evrenatlasi.org/en/2019/09/who-is-james-watt-inventions-steam-engine-industrial-revolution/ https://evrenatlasi.org/en/2019/09/who-is-james-watt-inventi...
geocrasher 5y ago
Yes, the Wrights were OG startup founders, and the first such to go full Darl McBride about their technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride I wonder if Danny McBride is any relation...
aurizon 5y ago
The Wright brothers were the original patent trolls and they held up US aviation for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war They would file and stretch their patents to try and cover what others invented.
- okareaman 5y ago
  This is a disputed claim according to your wikipedia link
  - aurizon 5y ago
    It is true!!. A dispute that had no basis. If they had asked reasonable royalties it would have been OK, but they refused to licence many makers - yet they failed to make their own planes in volume for related bad business reasons. Did you read where the early USAF on that era was forced to buy French a dn British planes due to the bad management by the Wrights
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Yes, the Wrights were poor businessmen. That does not take away from their great success at flight. They still managed to become wealthy.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > The Wright brothers were the original patent trolls Edison was not only a patent troll, but was besieged by other patent trolls. He spent much of his career in court defending his patents and trying to overturn others.
  - aurizon 5y ago
    Do you even know what a patent troll is? Edison actually invented many items that he patented and defended against infringers (and he trod on a few others patents). Usually a patent troll has never registered a patent. He buys patent rights to any and all things he can get very cheaply, He then has all the claims assessed to see if there is a fragment that applies to any company that uses that technology - and writes a demand letter for infringement fees. They often ask for $10,000 to $25,000 and many companies who are faced with hiring lawyers and spending $500,000 in even a winning defence - choose to pay it. The trolls live on these fees. I could live well on one letter a month. The troll has low costs, a copy of Word on a computer abd a printer + postage and often send hundreds of letters a day. Read this. https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=newegg https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=newegg
badhabit 5y ago
what is o.g. startup ?

36 points by saastring 5y ago

The article misses a couple of foundational things the Wright Brothers accomplished: - built one of the first wind tunnels, and published the most accurate performance data in the world: https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/results.html https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/results.html - built one of the first aero engines, and first using aluminum: https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/online/fly/1903/engine.cfm https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/onlin... The above items are simply amazing, and shows how the Wright Brothers couldn't be denied. (You can see later "aero engines" in the Hiller Museum in San Carlos (near SF) that can't even carry their own weight.) It's true that the brothers weren't killed while flying, but Orville was seriously injured crashing in 1908, and his passenger died from a head injury. Source: commercially-rated pilot, study aerodynamics.

WalterBright 5y ago

> The brothers were not the first to try to build a flying machine. They were the first to achieve controlled, powered flight. An overlooked, but crucial, part of their achievement is they developed the first mathematical theory of propellers. It enabled designs that were 90% efficient, about double that of other experimenters. This, of course, nearly doubled the effective horsepower of their engine. This is a major reason why the other pretenders to first flight failed. They simply didn't have the power/weight needed to fly, and the Wrights did. Where the Wrights goofed was in putting the elevator in front. They did this for good reason (hoping it would make it easier to recover from a stall). Unfortunately, it caused severe pitch instability making it hard to control and the Wrights were lucky to live through early flights.

ergocoder 5y ago
Yeah flying wasn't hard. Controlling it was hard. Wright got a lot of things right. They believed in flying skill.. that we must learn how to fly like a bird learning how to fly their whole life. They were also lucky with no major injury (at least one of the brothers wasn't) and had some family wealth IIRC.
mannykannot 5y ago
Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right, as Burt Rutan, among many others, has demonstrated [1]. As with the conventional rear stabilizer/elevator combination, part of it must either be fixed or function as if it is fixed by augmentation with centering devices such as springs or balance tabs, and the forward surface must have an angle of incidence greater than the rear one (longitudinal dihedral.) I recall reading somewhere that most of the Wright's competitors (maybe not Lillenthal) imagined flying to be like boating, but the Wrights realized that it would require more-or-less continuous input from the pilot to stay in control. I wonder if their profession as manufacturers of bicycles predisposed them to this insight. [1] https://www.flyingmag.com/photo-gallery/photos/awesome-airplanes-burt-rutan/ https://www.flyingmag.com/photo-gallery/photos/awesome-airpl...
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right, as Burt Rutan, among many others, has demonstrated [1]. As with the conventional rear stabilizer/elevator combination, part of it must either be fixed or function as if it is fixed by augmentation with centering devices such as springs or balance tabs, and the forward surface must have an angle of incidence greater than the rear one (longitudinal dihedral.) You're not wrong but nobody knew this in 190x nor could it have been reliably predicted because most of our knowledge about how low pressure gasses flow over surfaces in unconstrained environments (i.e. the atmosphere) comes from aviation which didn't yet exist in 190x.
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    Well, you can use models and wind tunnels, which, as Walter alludes to, the Wrights, unlike many of their competitors, did. The Wright Flyer was not airworthy by modern standards, but it served their purpose, which was to validate their approach and establish precedence. The state of aerodynamics in 190x was more advanced than I suspect you imagine, with Lanchester on the right track in thinking about vorticity. Here's an interesting article on the divide between theorists and practitioners (which the Wrights partially, but not completely, bridged - and the theorists were evidently not all communicating with each other, either), and it also mentions the flawed assumption, of flying being like boating, that I mentioned in my earlier post. https://www.aerosociety.com/media/4846/fw-lanchester-and-the-great-divide.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/4846/fw-lanchester-and-the... It also shows that Lanchester, regardless of his theoretical chops, was not a successful airplane designer! He comes across as putting too much emphasis on how he thought things should be.

bumbada 5y ago

The Wright brothers did not create from the void, they copied lots of things from other innovators, specially Otto Liliental, whom they admired a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal This is important because, for example they did not invent ailerons, but blended the wing and constant litigation from their patents block all progress in aviation in the US for a long time because they wanted to take possession of the inventions others have created(like ailerons) and became a monopoly. Only the war and the US gobertment intervening did stop the blocking.

WalterBright 5y ago
The Wrights' innovations are: 1. first mathematical propeller theory combining blade element theory with momentum theory, producing 90% efficient propellers 2. first lightweight aviation engine 3. first 3-axis control system 4. first use of wind tunnel to evaluate wing design of area, aspect ratio, airfoil section and tip shape 5. first research and development program using a series of prototypes to test each feature 6. correctly identifying that control was the primary problem 7. correctly identifying that an airplane must bank in order to turn 8. correctly identifying "adverse yaw" and the rudder as solution

Stratoscope 5y ago

One of the many cool things NASA did with the Ingenuity helicopter was to obtain a small patch of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flyer and tuck it under the solar panel. So not only did the Wright Brothers achieve the first controlled powered flight on Earth, but in a real way they also took part in the first flight on Mars.

a3n 5y ago

Boulton and Watt would be an even older O.G. startup, with Boulton as the business founder and Watt the technical founder. They formed their partnership on Watt's improvement over Newcomen's steam engine, used to drain water from mines. They then expanded to other applications for steam engines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulton_and_Watt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulton_and_Watt https://evrenatlasi.org/en/2019/09/who-is-james-watt-inventions-steam-engine-industrial-revolution/ https://evrenatlasi.org/en/2019/09/who-is-james-watt-inventi...

geocrasher 5y ago

Yes, the Wrights were OG startup founders, and the first such to go full Darl McBride about their technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride I wonder if Danny McBride is any relation...

aurizon 5y ago

The Wright brothers were the original patent trolls and they held up US aviation for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war They would file and stretch their patents to try and cover what others invented.

okareaman 5y ago
This is a disputed claim according to your wikipedia link
- aurizon 5y ago
  It is true!!. A dispute that had no basis. If they had asked reasonable royalties it would have been OK, but they refused to licence many makers - yet they failed to make their own planes in volume for related bad business reasons. Did you read where the early USAF on that era was forced to buy French a dn British planes due to the bad management by the Wrights
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Yes, the Wrights were poor businessmen. That does not take away from their great success at flight. They still managed to become wealthy.
WalterBright 5y ago
> The Wright brothers were the original patent trolls Edison was not only a patent troll, but was besieged by other patent trolls. He spent much of his career in court defending his patents and trying to overturn others.
- aurizon 5y ago
  Do you even know what a patent troll is? Edison actually invented many items that he patented and defended against infringers (and he trod on a few others patents). Usually a patent troll has never registered a patent. He buys patent rights to any and all things he can get very cheaply, He then has all the claims assessed to see if there is a fragment that applies to any company that uses that technology - and writes a demand letter for infringement fees. They often ask for $10,000 to $25,000 and many companies who are faced with hiring lawyers and spending $500,000 in even a winning defence - choose to pay it. The trolls live on these fees. I could live well on one letter a month. The troll has low costs, a copy of Word on a computer abd a printer + postage and often send hundreds of letters a day. Read this. https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=newegg https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=newegg

badhabit 5y ago

what is o.g. startup ?