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What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded paper (or your material here)

• morelisp 4y ago
  Kites are prehistorical. You can't really get earlier than that, unless we find some pre-human primates making them. (parent edited) > Then, why not make it bigger? To what end? They were lifting bombs on kites as early as the 7th century, as well as humans as novelties (and punishments - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Huangtou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Huangtou). If you want a lift a human to do something, you also need some better steering and safe landing, and those require more reliable engineering besides just the basic lift possibility.
  • zabzonk 4y ago
    Kind of supports my question - if tethered kites, why not untethered ones (i.e. aircraft)? And man-lifting kites have, of course been a thing for ages.
    • morelisp 4y ago
      Reliable steering requires aerodynamics requires quite a lot of mathematical development, plus considerable precision engineering. And it's extremely dangerous, a lot of people did die trying to make steerable kites.
      • zabzonk 4y ago
        > quite a lot of mathematical development, plus considerable precision engineering Not sure the Wright brothers would be with you on this - neither were maths guys and their aircraft were hardly precision-built.
        • morelisp 4y ago
          And what, there's nobody between Archimedes and the Wright Brothers I could have been referring to? Whatever...
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • dredmorbius 4y ago
          The Wrights did extensive experimentation, on both models an full-sized prototypes. They built the first wind tunnel and developed calculations for lift and propeller thrust. They also practiced fairly rapid design iteration, trying out ideas and adapting to actual experience. What they arrived at worked, though it was far from ideal and doesn't much resemble modern aircraft (beyond the notion of wings and the rough principles of control surfaces). Once other designers / engineers entered the field, and with more reliable engines, further iteration advanced rapidly. Military aircraft played a significant role in WWI, only a decade after the Wright's first powered flight.
        • slightknack 4y ago
          > He identified the four forces which act on a heavier-than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust. [...] He also designed the first glider reliably reported to carry a human aloft. He correctly predicted that sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift. The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the development of aviation. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley I think by the time the Wright brothers came around, the general theory for powered flight was in place. The Wright Flyer was precision engineered, compared to most 'kites' that came before it. It's not every day you see an internal combustion engine on a kite.
          • notahacker 4y ago
            > It's not every day you see an internal combustion engine on a kite. Yup. The engine was more important than the understanding of the principles of propulsion too: even if the four forces had been identified by Aristotle, that wouldn't have been much use in achieving sustained powered flight to civilisations whose closest approximation of a propellor powered by a turbine engine was a waterwheel.
      • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        Hang gliders seem quite imprecise, https://www.google.com/search?q=bamboo+framed+hang+glider https://www.google.com/search?q=bamboo+framed+hang+glider
• kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Paper airplanes were around for centuries. Nobody knew how they worked.
  • f0e4c2f7 4y ago
    This is really interesting and I had never considered it before. Would you happen to know any books or articles that tell the history leading up to the wright brothers but focusing on those kind of questions and theories?
    • morelisp 4y ago
      Although the mathematics is quite complex (Newton, Bernoulli, Navier-Stokes) the history happens fairly quickly as the mathematics appears. Bernoulli published in 1738, Cayley designed the fixed-wing aircraft in 1799. From that point it was mostly a matter of finding ways to increase thrust / reduce weight through better engine design to achieve useful flight time / lift.
  • zabzonk 4y ago
    Nobody knew how penecilin worked when it was first discovered (we now know it inhibits the growth of the bacterial cell wall) but that did not stop people using it, to good effect. Similar for many other discoveries/inventions.
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      More generally: technology (engineering) delivers results. Understanding why it does so is not required, and often comes quite late. If you want explanation, that's a role of science, though it's often preceded by a very long period of systematic observation. One striking example is geology, which has existed since at least the 17th century, but which didn't formally adopt its central organising and explanatory principle, of plate tectonics, until 1965. Biology (evolution and DNA), physics (celestial mechanics, particle physics, reletivity, and quantum theory), and chemistry (periodic table and electron orbitals) also come to mind. Thermodynamics arose out of work with steam engines, and eventually developed to the point that the theoretical understanding and equations began driving, rather than being driven by, engineering accomplishments. Electrical engineering is another example where modern developments required understanding of, and calculations based on, circuit and field theory, rather than just more lab experimentation. (I'm hazy on details here, though this is my general understanding.) There are practices which existed for many thousands of years before a deep understanding was achieved: fermentation, fire, firing ceramics, glassmaking, smelting metals, and many agricultural practices. Doing and understanding are separate undertakings.
• Jensson 4y ago
  They lacked the physics theory to make planes stable enough to carry a load, and nobody wants to experiment throwing themselves out over a cliff with prototype wings that will likely get them killed.
  • zabzonk 4y ago
    > nobody wants to experiment throwing themselves out over a cliff with prototype wings that will likely get them killed. Actually, not a few people did exactly that! If they had used a scaled-up paper plane, they might have lived. Or think of a modern hang-glider, but made from bamboo and silk.
  • magpi3 4y ago
    He wasn't testing wings, but you make me think of this poor, brave man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Eiffel_Tower_jump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Eiffel_Tower_ju...
  • dham 4y ago
    You didn't need to throw yourself off a cliff though. Just think of something like Jockey's Ridge.
    • saalweachter 4y ago
      I mean, an improvement, but that just means that you'll be killed when your wings half work (enough to lift you into the air high enough that the fall will kill you) rather than when your wings don't work at all.
• narag 4y ago
  Only the tough materials (stone, bones, metal, pottery) remain. I always wonder how many civilizations disappeared without a trace because they built their cities with wood. Maybe a lot of devices were invented and reinvented many times and then forgotten because there wasn't a practical purpose for them at the moment.
  • saalweachter 4y ago
    It's probably the case that foundations get invented pretty darn quick in a civilization that builds primarily with wood. Wood rots too fast in environments where (a) trees grow and (b) wood is in contact with the ground. Midden heaps can also close the gap.
  • masswerk 4y ago
    My favorite example is the Antikythera mechanism. It is quite clear that this had not been a one-of-a-kind, but that there must have been (many) predecessors of this technology to arrive at the kind of workmanship and layout that doesn't show any marks of hesitation or corrections as in the sole example, we know of. And that we know of this example at all, is just by sheer luck. Generally, we only know of landmark size applications of historical technology, which tend to be rare.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      It probably wasn't as common as the slide rule was in the 50's but I'm pretty sure there were more of these and some predecessors as well. The chance that we have found the only example that ever existed for something so useful seems slim.
• globalise83 4y ago
  I often wonder the same. As someone with a hobby of making unpowered gliders from balsa wood and laminating sheets, I often wonder why such simple contraptions (I can make very nice gliders with around 20 pieces of wood and one sheet) weren't discovered using easily available woods and paper many centuries ago and extrapolated to bigger machines with fabric and wooden struts. Seems that the raw materials would have been available in Roman times and only very minimal amounts of theory (as opposed to trial and error tinkering) are required. Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were never invented for warfare.
  • earthbee 4y ago
    Maybe because trial an error improvement isn't possible if you're actually flying the vehicle? Just a guess.
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      Solution: send your butler up in it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley
  • morelisp 4y ago
    > Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were never invented for warfare. What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite#Military_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite#Military_applications Steering is important though, you need to a) go up, b) go the right place, not back at you, c) come down, again not where you are.
    • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      I wonder how much people tried to develop ballistae projectiles, perhaps once they had bolts/darts they were good enough and longer range just wasn't necessary?
      • morelisp 4y ago
        In most cases if your goal is just to get some explosives over a tall wall, a trebuchet or siege tower is probably sufficient. On the other hand, if you have a lot of gunpowder, a cannon is also pretty fine on its own without any need to go up-and-over.
• iso1631 4y ago
  Heavier than air flight dates back at least 2500 years from bamboo helicopter toys in China, with various others through the 17th to 19th century, however the first manned, powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft wasn't until Whitehead, Wright et. al at the end of the 19th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Primitive_beginnings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Primitiv...
• masswerk 4y ago
  Mind Eilmer of Malmesbury, first flight between 995 and 1010 CE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury
  • masswerk 4y ago
    P.S.: The story of Eilmer also hints at what may have been the real problem, which may have haunted early fliers, not so much flying/gliding, but safe landing. Another thing is topography: Either you have (steep) local elevations as a natural starting point for gliding, but then there is usually not much of an open space to go for a real application. Or there are wide open spaces, but no natural elevations. (Mind Eilmer starting from a tower.) So, even if you know about the principles, there's not much application for human flight, rendering it rather for use as a toy. (There are hints for bird-shaped gliding toys in ancient Egypt. But was there really a human-flight scale application in an all flat landscape like this?)
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      Annecdote time: I live in Lincoln, UK - to the East everything is flat as a pancake until you get to the Wolds, and to the west we have the similarly flat floodplain of the Trent river. In between, we have the very steep Lincolnshire Edge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cliff) and the prospective aeronaut could have jumped off Lincoln Cathedral (https://lincolncathedral.com)- https://lincolncathedral.com)- way back when the highest building in the world. So ideal for developing a useful glider. And of course Lincolnshire is famous for being "bomber country" in WW2 - weather and geography helping to get the horribly overladen beasts airborn.
• pirate787 4y ago
  In European culture, there's the myth of Icarus, whose wings failed in flight. I wonder if there's a real-life basis for this tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus
• goto11 4y ago
  Probably because sustained heavier-than-air flight requires an engine. So same reason the car was not invented earlier - a coal-powered steam engine is too heavy.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Steam has other disadvantages. It's quite good at steady-power output. Throttle response is poor. Both automobiles and aircraft operate with quite variable power requirements. Though at least for long-range air travel, once the take-off / climb portion of flight has been completed, cruise is typically at a fairly constant setting.
  • Koshkin 4y ago
    I does not have to be "sustained" for more than a few minutes to be called a flight. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltaplane https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltaplane
    • goto11 4y ago
      Sure, but beside the point. There are many historical examples of heavier-than-air flight (kites, gliders etc.), but without means of self-propulsion it is not very practically useful.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed. Once rapid design-build-test cycles were practial, the initial Wright design rapidly shifted to a monocoque fuselage with forward wings and empennage, emerging within a decade. In just over 30 years after the Wright's first powered flight, the DC-3, an aircraft still in commercial operation was flying. It has been described as the perfection of aircraft design, and the major elements of its design are still present on contemporary aircraft, though of course jet engines have largely replace reciprocating piston engines. Major factors in successful powered or unpowered flight have been understanding aerodynamics (largely through experimentation and test flights, increasingly through modelling), materials (pre-industrial materials are poorly suited to human-scale aircraft or gliders), controls (both theory and interfaces), powerplants (on powered aircraft). Ultralights, hang gliders, and sailplanes all benefit greatly from specific materials: Nylon for wings, aluminium for structural members, plastics, and steel for wires and cables. Instrumentation, navigation, communications, transponders (safety) and radar (collision detection) also factor in. Virtually all of these are dependent on earlier stages of industrialisation: smelting of iron and aluminium, petroleum chemistry and textiles fabrication for Nylon and plastics, earlier aviation engineering for general flight handling and control theory, electronics for instrumentation, radio, and radar, plus domain knowledge from other fields such as physics (instrumentation, controls, etc.). TL;DR: Prerequisites and path dependencies.
  • criley2 4y ago
    >Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed. The only thing I would change is that this makes it seem like powered flight was waiting on the engine, when it was waiting on the plane. One thing that struck me at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is how far advanced IC technology was while the Wright brothers were gliding in wooden contraptions. They had turbocharged v12 diesel engines and Benz was already making aluminum engines for cars before the Wright brothers made their first attempt. I found it fascinating how as soon as flight was demonstrated, it only took a few years to go from a wooden prototype to a sophisticated machine with a very complex engine. Bonus pic of some of those early engines https://i.imgur.com/mENnuHH.png https://i.imgur.com/mENnuHH.png
• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  What amazes me about heavier than air flight is that it was invented all over the planet at virtually the same time by all kinds of unrelated people who had no connection or communication with or little knowledge of one another. Sure here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of nowhere. But in reality, heavier than air flight was invented simultaneously (by the standards of the time) at multiple places all over the world from New Zealand (March 1903) [1] to the USA (December 1903) [2]. It's as if human consciousness just exploded with a new-found ability to fly all over the earth all at once. Closer examination shows that like most human inventions, these breakthrough moments are the final incremental accumulation of ideas that were a long-time coming. In the case of flight, there were centuries of lighter than air flying methods based on buoyancy and displacement [3]. Then gradually an understanding of fixed wing aerodynamics evolved (e.g. the impressive work of people like George Cayley [4] and Otto Lilienthal [5]). It was the parallel development of combustion engines that made the Kitty Hawk and Waitohi moments eventually possible (which I think might really the answer to your question "why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier?"). While the invention of the steam engine gave rise to the entire industrial revolution, piston steam engines of the time were too heavy to power flight. The internal combustion engine was finally applied to the automobile by Karl Benz in 1885 [6] and within the relatively short span of 18 years had evolved to the point where powering an aerodynamic surface was feasible. Just 66 years later man walked on the moon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
  • zabzonk 4y ago
    I think that what you say is probably true, but things like thermal-riding or slope-soaring gliders would have been very useful (for the military, if nothing else) before the invention of the IC engine.
• random314 4y ago
  Michael faraday invented the motor in the 1820s. Successive refinements to the motor and the gas engine and electricity distribution projects led to electrification, the motor car and the powered airplane as an immediate consequence.
• GistNoesis 4y ago
  The boomerang is quite old.
• antonhowes 4y ago
  Fantastic question, which is some way down on my to-do list after the steam engine. The discussion this prompted is a real goldmine, so thank you.