17 ms·

The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil

246 points by benbreen 2y ago

rgehan 2y ago
http://archive.today/2025.03.21-091549/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/21/brazil-airplane-wright-brothers-santos-dumont/ http://archive.today/2025.03.21-091549/https://www.washingto...
aap_ 2y ago
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.
- stavros 2y ago
  Well, I wasn't convinced by the Brazilians' argument that catapults don't count, but then Otto Lilienthal's flights should also count. Either you want completely unaided flight, and Dumont did it first, or you don't, and Lilienthal's flights are the first.
  - munchler 2y ago
    Lilienthal flew with gliders. The Wright brothers claim the first powered flight (i.e. an airplane).
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      The Wright brothers have invented many components of an airplane, which made powered flight possible, but it seems inappropriate to say that they have invented an "airplane". The idea of making an "airplane", with fixed wings and with screw propellers, had been widespread for most of the second half of the 19th century, and it had been discussed in countless publications and in "heavier-than-air" flight clubs. However, before the Wright brothers, nobody had succeeded to build such an airplane that actually worked, the main reason being the lack of an appropriate system of aircraft controls, like that conceived by the Wright brothers. The patent obtained by the Wright brothers, is formulated very well and of course it does not claim to have invented any new kind of flying machine, but it claims certain new and useful improvements in flying machines of the airplane kind (most of which refer to the aircraft control surfaces).
      - clippyplz 2y ago
        If they are the first to build an airplane that "actually worked", then why would it be inappropriate to say they invented an airplane? It wouldn't be appropriate to say "they were responsible for 100% of the technological development and research that led to this machine" but if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.
        adrian_b 2y ago
        Their invention patent (US 821,393) correctly claims the invention of a 3-axis airplane orientation control system, not the invention of the airplane, which is treated as a well-known class of flying-machines, which is improved by their invention. An airplane without good aircraft controls could start to fly without problems, but it would normally crash sooner or later, either due to flight instabilities or because it had to eventually land somewhere.
        xandrius 2y ago
        Say, if I invent everything to make a bike work but the wheels just happen to be a teeny tiny too small to actually allow someone to ride it uninterrupted. You come and adjust them. Did you just invent the bike? Or did you build upon my previous invention(s) and perfected it, making us both partial inventors?
        mannykannot 2y ago
        You only get partial credit unless you figured out what, precisely, needed to be done, but had someone else do it for you.
        nyeah 2y ago
        'if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.' People invent things. But "airplane" turned out to be much more than one thing. Not all of them were invented by Curtiss (a local favorite), or by Santos-Dumont, or by Lilienthal, Caproni, the Wrights, or whoever.
        nyeah 2y ago
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Dumont did it first in the sense that he achieved a flight long enough, i.e. over 100 meter, in order to win the prize for such a flight that had been instituted a couple of years earlier. A half of year before Santos Dumont, also in Paris, there had been other flight attempts that had succeeded to take off completely unaided, by rolling on wheels (by Traian Vuia), but the achieved lengths of sustained flight had been much shorter, too short to qualify for any prize. So while the achievements of Santos Dumont are very commendable, the word "invention" is not really appropriate for them, because all he had done was to do better some of the things already done by others in their attempts to win the French flight prizes. The Wright brothers have started from Otto Lilienthal's work. While their improvements have been extremely important, their work has also not started from zero, but it had built upon the work of the predecessors. In the history of inventions, it is typically impossible to say that something has really begun with some inventor. Instead of that, the right way is to point to each inventor and show what they have done better than what existed before them.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    Or you want an American, in which case the Wright Brothers won
    - gota 2y ago
      As is tradition.
- VMG 2y ago
  The same is true to some extent for cars (Ford/Benz). LLMs will even answer differently depending on the language the question is asked. Edit: I cannot actually reproduce this with the automobile question, but asking ChatGPT-4o about the inventor of TV yields different answers: Asking in German yields Paul Nipkow and Philo Farnsworth, asking in English yields Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird Asking about Radio inventors in German yields Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, Marconi, Fessenden. In English it yields Marconi and Tesla.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    Thats actually more interesting that LLMs answer based on language questions are asked, I never thought to test that. It would be nice if we got to a point where you train an LLM to genuinely figure out these nuances and fix its own model.
    - Sam6late 2y ago
      Google, I suspect, would do the same, if you were in Texas coffee's origin would not get you the result that mentions Yemen, Ethiopia would be the first result. This is how I won a $100 bet with a Texan who insisted that google gave him Ethiopia. The trouble is, we were in the Middle East when asking google for the bet.
  - readingnews 2y ago
    I have not actually heard that argument. It has always been noted that Benz invented the car, and Ford invented the assembly line, for cars.
    - devilbunny 2y ago
      Yeah, as an American I never was taught that Ford invented cars. He invented cheap cars.
    - mr_toad 2y ago
      He was the first to mass produce cars. But given that cars and mass production already existed it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to mass produce cars.
- bane 2y ago
  If it makes you feel better, in the U.S. we learn that the Wright brothers used Lilienthal's glider data extensively in the R&D phases of their work. He managed to gather a lot of data on gliders and glide slopes which informed the brothers' earlier work. Their achievement summits their peers only in qualifications, the first: - powered - controlled - heavier than air - sustained - flight
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The Wrights did use Lilienthal's data for their earlier gliders, but it turned out to be off by a factor of 2. That is why the Wrights built a wind tunnel to determine the correct values.
- ricksunny 2y ago
  Lol - when I studied aerospace in France the hagiography literature was all about Louis Breguet and Louis Bleriot. I don't recall mention (i.e. in general conversation, offhand references in non-formal literature, or on posters, etc.) about the Wright brothers. Oddly I don't recall much mention of Alberto Santos-Dumont either so, go figure.
lupusreal 2y ago
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.
- db48x 2y ago
  And they only used a wooden rail the first year at Kitty Hawk, when they only had a glider. They had decided to tackle the problem of control first and propulsion later. The glider took off by sliding downhill on a rail, while the Flyer they built the next year took off under its own power on level ground. Not only that, but they were the first to realize that the tables of lift published by whatshisname the French guy were bogus. They built a wind tunnel so that they could make their own measurements of lift and drag. Weirdly, the wind tunnel had been invented ~50 years earlier! Apparently most of the Europeans who were playing with gliders that whole time didn’t even know about wind tunnels or they might have thought to put two and two together.
- shaky-carrousel 2y ago
  It seems like the propellers worked fine. > On 23 October, Santos-Dumont presented himself at Bagatelle with the Oiseau de Proie II, a modification of the original model. The plane had been varnished to reduce the porosity of the fabric and increase lift. The rear wheel had been removed. In the morning he limited himself to manoeuvring the aircraft across the field, until the propeller shaft broke. It was repaired in the afternoon, and the plane was moved into position for an official attempt. An expectant crowd was present. At 4:45 pm, Santos-Dumont started the engine.[107] The plane lifted off and flew for 60 metres,[26]: 18 without taking advantage of headwinds, ramps, catapults, slopes, or other devices. The flight had taken place solely by the aircraft's own means, and Europeans at the time believed it was the first such achievement.
stzsch 2y ago
Also radio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
- maratc 2y ago
  The correct link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Popov_(physicist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Popov_(physicist) of course :)
fermigier 2y ago
If you're French, it's Clément Ader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader
- 317070 2y ago
  Or the Montgolfier brothers! That was the first time humans went up in the air. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers I was surprised the first time I heard Americans attribute flight to the Wright brothers. (For reference, I was educated in Belgium)
idoubtit 2y ago
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.
- xoa 2y ago
  I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. And how the pieces come together can change the course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016 and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down. You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.
pjc50 2y ago
Relatedly, who invented the television? Marconi or Baird?
- knicholes 2y ago
  Neither. Farnsworth did. Maybe you're asking about the radio, was it Marconi or Tesla?
  - figomore 2y ago
    Also Roberto Landell de Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
    - UncleSlacky 2y ago
      And John Logie Baird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#First_public_demonstrations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#First_public_...
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    There's a decent argument that Bain invented it as facsimile in the 1840s and everything from there on til the introduction of commercial television was essentially just refinement until it produced a high enough frame rate and without wires.
tomohawk 2y ago
[dead]
upofadown 2y ago
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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I"m starting to wonder when, if ever, patents did not hinder technological advancement on the net.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    When the development of the innovation requires a bunch of up-front capital.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    Various improvements to machinery during the industrial revolution were only possible with vast amounts of investment upfront, and the patent system made that possible. You're not going to be building a factory powering steam engine at home, even if you've found a method that will increase its efficiency by a significant margin. Of course, patents are only respected when a country is in the lead. Early America was notorious for espionage and strategically ignoring patents to bolster its own economy, and China doesn't really care about what patents you may have when one of their companies is competing with you.
    - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      Related, a good article on how a contributing factor to the founding of Hollywood as the world's movie capital was due to Thomas Edison's stranglehold on patents: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/ https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-th...
adev_ 2y ago
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 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.
- clan 2y ago
  Santos Dumont had close competition by Jacob Ellehammer[1] who is probably only (mostly) known locally. But truly pioneers: Building planes, helicopters and cars totally from scratch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Ellehammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Ellehammer
mkl 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
- troyvit 2y ago
  There's a great No Such Thing as a Fish podcast episode that talks about him: https://audioboom.com/posts/8641985-no-such-thing-as-a-honey-badger-on-toast https://audioboom.com/posts/8641985-no-such-thing-as-a-honey...
weeksie 2y ago
The Kiwis too have their own "invented the airplane" guy (Pearse?) Seems a lot was happening at that point in history.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Nursie 2y ago
And in New Zealand you may credit Pearse - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
arnaudsm 2y ago
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.
throw0101c 2y ago
There's an article that goes over various claims: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
readthenotes1 2y ago
1907 in France (by a Brazilian) vs 1903 in the USA
newsuser 2y ago
Also, if we are talking X-rays, in Ukraine it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Puluj 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).
Beijinger 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
s_dev 2y ago
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.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  That one is a little different, as both Poland and the UK considered breaking the Enigma machine a state secret until the 1970s. That Polish mathematicians broke the codes, and shared this information with the British, is taught in the UK. My understanding (from school in England) is the British codebreakers' contribution was to scale up the scale of the codebreaking, by using lots of machines and their own mathematical innovations.
gcanyon 2y ago
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_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  This one is very steampunk (and batman) like! It's also literally steam powered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Avion_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Avion_III
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal )
- tdullien 2y ago
  And Konrad Zuse invented the computer.
  - addandsubtract 2y ago
    and Karl Benz the car.
    - akie 2y ago
      And they did! They both literally did.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    And the computer mouse was not invented by Douglas Engelbart at Xerox PARC, but by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken: > https://www.heise.de/news/Auf-den-Spuren-der-deutschen-Computermaus-216255.html https://www.heise.de/news/Auf-den-Spuren-der-deutschen-Compu... > https://www.zeit.de/news/2019-05/14/deutscher-erfinder-gibt-ur-pc-maus-ins-museum-190514-99-215820 https://www.zeit.de/news/2019-05/14/deutscher-erfinder-gibt-... > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Mallebrein https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Mallebrein Quote from the first link: "Vor einem knappen halben Jahr feierte die Technikwelt den 40. Jahrestag der "Mother of all Demos", die am 9. Dezember 1968 die Computermaus an die Öffentlichkeit brachte. Demo-Leiter Douglas Engelbart gilt seitdem als Erfinder des immer noch genialsten und griffigsten Eingabegeräts der Informatik. Diese Ansicht muss jedoch korrigiert werden, denn schon einige Wochen vorher erschien eine Publikation der Firma Telefunken, die ein Input-Instrument vorstellte, das an Monitoren hing und funktionell der Engelbart-Maus gleichkam: die so genannte Rollkugel. Seit den frühen 70er-Jahren wurde sie zusammen mit Telefunken-Rechnern verkauft und in der Praxis eingesetzt, und mindestens ein Exemplar hat in einem Museum überlebt." Google Translate: "Almost half a year ago, the technology world celebrated the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos," which introduced the computer mouse to the public on December 9, 1968. Since then, the demo's leader, Douglas Engelbart, has been considered the inventor of what is still the most ingenious and handy input device in computer science. This view, however, must be corrected, because a few weeks earlier, a publication by the Telefunken company appeared, introducing an input device that hung from monitors and was functionally equivalent to the Engelbart mouse: the so-called trackball. Since the early 1970s, it was sold alongside Telefunken computers and used in practice, and at least one example has survived in a museum."
conartist6 2y ago
They didn't even mention the name "Lilienthal" who the Wright Brothers knew to have flown a heavier than air craft before they did...
nashashmi 2y ago
In other places, Abbas ibn Firnas is taught as the inventor of flight (glide) in 9th century. https://mideast.unc.edu/flight-of-fancy/ https://mideast.unc.edu/flight-of-fancy/.
delichon 2y ago
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.
bane 2y ago
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.
- mannykannot 2y ago
  When Wilbur Wright first demonstrated his airplane (a Model A somewhat modified while repairing the damage caused in shipping) in Le Mans, it was immediately apparent to the mostly enthusiastic crowd that this was the first fully controlled flight any of them had seen - a tight two-mile circuit with a controlled landing near the launch point. Many of those present would have been well acquainted with what Santos-Dumont and other pioneers had previously achieved.
OnACoffeeBreak 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#State_rivalry
engineer_22 2y ago
Somebody at WaPo taking a stand against Bezo's "America, liberty, innovation" memo
kshahkshah 2y ago
I highly recommend this book: Sky High!: A Soaring History of Aviation especially for those with children as a fun illustrated history of the individuals and their contributions to making modern aviation possible today. Suffice to say and as other commenters said, no one individual or pair of individuals made the airplane.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
- shawabawa3 2y ago
  you got it backwards Ohio: Birthplace of Aviation (wright brothers born/lived in Ohio) North Carolina: First in flight (first powered flight was in NC)
ninalanyon 2y ago
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.
- bisRepetita 2y ago
  Then I'll claim Leonardo da Vinci almost did it with his aerial screw in the 15th century ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw
desdenova 2y ago
The wright brothers invented a slingshot, not an airplane.
1970-01-01 2y ago
>“They didn’t take off on their own,” said Márcio Bhering Cardoso, the former director of the Brazil’s national aerospace museum. “They needed help.” Let's also discount all rocket launches near the equator, as this is also cheating.
jstanley 2y ago
The inventor of the aeroplane (to the extent that the question even has an answer) doesn't depend on what country you're in! How many legs does a dog have if I call it's tail a leg?
pjbk 2y ago
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://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344143803/date https://archive.org/details/larophile08besa https://archive.org/details/larophile08besa
nailer 2y ago
> 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.
mannykannot 2y ago
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.
- culi 2y ago
  It feels like every country has it's own "we actually invented airplanes" story. Growing up I heard form my parents, who are from a little-talked about country, claim that their country was the one that invented airplanes. I think it's similar to the lightbulb. The availability of certain other technologies allowed for an explosion in invention leading to many simultaneous "discoveries" of the same basic inventions. In the US it seems we prioritize the documentation through the patent system to ascribe credit
archeantus 2y ago
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.
brolumir 2y ago
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.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  I think it's pretty obvious in hindsight that the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here. The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets. Putting a man on the moon showed that America was vastly more capable on a technical level, but that wasn't really the point of the space race. It's also why governments are carefully watching North Korea's space program, even if they'll never be able to put a man on the moon. Their ability to launch a sattelite into orbit makes them a threat, whether or not they can make a moon lander has little real value beyond vanity.
  - mlyle 2y ago
    > The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets. The US and the Soviets had operational ICBMs at pretty much the same time-- dueling milestones from 1957 to 1959. Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs. Then the US caught up and surpassed them. Then both stagnated; Russia did a slightly better job in choosing priorities for human spaceflight; the US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight.
    - jandrese 2y ago
      > Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs. In the US the story is that because Soviet nukes were more crude than the US versions, which made them heavier and bulkier so the Soviets had to build their rockets bigger to have enough range. When the focus shifted to putting a man in orbit having a larger rocket to start with was an advantage and allowed the Soviets to achieve a number of firsts. I do agree that declaring the race suddenly over with a man on the moon was a case of taking the ball and going home.
jldugger 2y ago
Relatedly, just listened to one of the oldest Engines of Our Ingenuity episodes: 32 -- Wright and Langley. > Curtiss went to work, strengthening the structure, adding controls, reshaping it aerodynamically, relocating the center of gravity -- in short, making it airworthy. In 1914 he flew it for 150 feet, and then he went back and replaced the old motor as well. On the basis of Curtiss's reconstruction, the Smithsonian honored Langley for having built the first successful flying machine.[...] In 1942 the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Abbot, finally authorized publication of an article that clearly showed the Langley reconstruction was rigged. https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/32 https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/32
WalterBright 2y ago
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.
- hathawsh 2y ago
  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.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    See "The Wright Brothers as Engineers" by Quentin Wald https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-Experience/dp/0970607504 https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-E...
  - lcfcjs6 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - QuantumGood 2y ago
      I do NOT think it is AI-generated (though it might be), and that belief could be part of why you are being downvoted. I've been watching the sentiment on AI-related comments for a while. It seems to have somewhat turned back to "if it's useful, it's okay" as long as it isn't promoted as AI.
pig_dog 2y ago
Beat the paywall link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250324104124/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/21/brazil-airplane-wright-brothers-santos-dumont/#expand https://web.archive.org/web/20250324104124/https://www.washi...
deleted 2y ago
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layman51 2y ago
The way the headline is written reminds me of a popular theory in Mexico that Thomas Alva Edison was born in Zacatecas State in Mexico.
citrin_ru 2y ago
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 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.
NelsonMinar 2y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman_Gilmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman_Gilmore
randunel 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traian_Vuia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traian_Vuia
- alborzb 2y ago
  >> He is credited with a powered hop of 11 m (36 ft) made on 18 March 1906 Revisionist History like this fascinates me. It is very well documented, with written texts, witnesses and even a handful of photographs that the Wright brothers had functional manned aircraft 3 years prior in 1903... Yet I've personally seen Romanian postal stamps that credit Vuia with "the first flight" for him managing to jump just 11m (36 ft) in a plane.
  - randunel 2y ago
    If jumping off a cliff (or a steep dune, like the wright brothers did) counts as flying, then it's been done many times before mankind, even. The first actual flight, with the aeroplane taking off and flying instead of a human jumping off a cliff/dune, was Vuia's. You cherry picked the wrong quote, read the entire articles.
toasterlovin 2y ago
I think a separate and (to me, at least) more interesting question is why the US seems to have been (and is still now) so good at commercializing and deploying new technologies.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  Depends on when you're talking about, imo post WW2 so much happened here because we survived the war pretty much entirely intact so our industry could continue to boom while the rest of the world rebuilt. That's always been my prevailing theory about the rabid success of the later half of the 20th century.
lsh123 2y ago
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_Airplane/Who_Was_First/Santos_Dumont/Santos_Dumont.htm https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_...
cubefox 2y ago
Similar: Who invented the automobile, telephone, computer? The answer likely depends on your country of origin.
Animats 2y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines
gorfian_robot 2y ago
New Zealand did it first! https://vimeo.com/ondemand/forgottensilver https://vimeo.com/ondemand/forgottensilver
aj7 2y ago
Brings to mind Feynman’s takedown of the Brazilian educational system in the 60’s.
fabiofzero 2y ago
I believe Santos Dumont did it because: 1. Spite 2. He was a much cooler person The US has claimed much more for much less in the past don't @ me.
jeleh 2y ago
The truth is: We will never know for sure. Have a look at the German aviation pioneer "Gustav Weißkopf" aka "Gustave Whitehead": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead
tdiff 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Landsberg#Discovery_of_the_combinational_scattering_of_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Landsberg#Discovery_of...
teleforce 2y ago
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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer
- presentation 2y ago
  Don’t know about the rest of the world, but many regional flights in the Americas are operated on Embraer planes. My sense is they are dominant for smaller jets rather than long haul flights/military aircraft like the ones you listed.
jonny_eh 2y ago
This farmer in New Zealand also apparently invented powered flight first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
merman 2y ago
This thread seems like a good example of how to subtly be negative and breed cynicism. Nitpick (see pedantic and mostly irrelevant replies to the excellent top comment. Who cares, anyway? Whatabout all the other things that have ever happened? (see 2nd comment, 3rd comment) More nitpicking, 4th comment Top comment, and further down, the comments and discussion are quite good. I do wonder about how large an impact a targeted, small amount of astroturfing can accomplish. just boost/inject some cynicism and negativity into the top 2-4 comments, nothing too obvious. Just enough to poison the well a bit.
deleted 2y ago
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drweevil 2y ago
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.

246 points by benbreen 2y ago

http://archive.today/2025.03.21-091549/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/21/brazil-airplane-wright-brothers-santos-dumont/ http://archive.today/2025.03.21-091549/https://www.washingto...

aap_ 2y ago

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.

stavros 2y ago
Well, I wasn't convinced by the Brazilians' argument that catapults don't count, but then Otto Lilienthal's flights should also count. Either you want completely unaided flight, and Dumont did it first, or you don't, and Lilienthal's flights are the first.
- munchler 2y ago
  Lilienthal flew with gliders. The Wright brothers claim the first powered flight (i.e. an airplane).
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    The Wright brothers have invented many components of an airplane, which made powered flight possible, but it seems inappropriate to say that they have invented an "airplane". The idea of making an "airplane", with fixed wings and with screw propellers, had been widespread for most of the second half of the 19th century, and it had been discussed in countless publications and in "heavier-than-air" flight clubs. However, before the Wright brothers, nobody had succeeded to build such an airplane that actually worked, the main reason being the lack of an appropriate system of aircraft controls, like that conceived by the Wright brothers. The patent obtained by the Wright brothers, is formulated very well and of course it does not claim to have invented any new kind of flying machine, but it claims certain new and useful improvements in flying machines of the airplane kind (most of which refer to the aircraft control surfaces).
    - clippyplz 2y ago
      If they are the first to build an airplane that "actually worked", then why would it be inappropriate to say they invented an airplane? It wouldn't be appropriate to say "they were responsible for 100% of the technological development and research that led to this machine" but if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.
      - adrian_b 2y ago
        Their invention patent (US 821,393) correctly claims the invention of a 3-axis airplane orientation control system, not the invention of the airplane, which is treated as a well-known class of flying-machines, which is improved by their invention. An airplane without good aircraft controls could start to fly without problems, but it would normally crash sooner or later, either due to flight instabilities or because it had to eventually land somewhere.
      - xandrius 2y ago
        Say, if I invent everything to make a bike work but the wheels just happen to be a teeny tiny too small to actually allow someone to ride it uninterrupted. You come and adjust them. Did you just invent the bike? Or did you build upon my previous invention(s) and perfected it, making us both partial inventors?
        mannykannot 2y ago
        You only get partial credit unless you figured out what, precisely, needed to be done, but had someone else do it for you.
      - nyeah 2y ago
        'if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.' People invent things. But "airplane" turned out to be much more than one thing. Not all of them were invented by Curtiss (a local favorite), or by Santos-Dumont, or by Lilienthal, Caproni, the Wrights, or whoever.
      - nyeah 2y ago
- adrian_b 2y ago
  Dumont did it first in the sense that he achieved a flight long enough, i.e. over 100 meter, in order to win the prize for such a flight that had been instituted a couple of years earlier. A half of year before Santos Dumont, also in Paris, there had been other flight attempts that had succeeded to take off completely unaided, by rolling on wheels (by Traian Vuia), but the achieved lengths of sustained flight had been much shorter, too short to qualify for any prize. So while the achievements of Santos Dumont are very commendable, the word "invention" is not really appropriate for them, because all he had done was to do better some of the things already done by others in their attempts to win the French flight prizes. The Wright brothers have started from Otto Lilienthal's work. While their improvements have been extremely important, their work has also not started from zero, but it had built upon the work of the predecessors. In the history of inventions, it is typically impossible to say that something has really begun with some inventor. Instead of that, the right way is to point to each inventor and show what they have done better than what existed before them.
- ta1243 2y ago
  Or you want an American, in which case the Wright Brothers won
  - gota 2y ago
    As is tradition.
VMG 2y ago
The same is true to some extent for cars (Ford/Benz). LLMs will even answer differently depending on the language the question is asked. Edit: I cannot actually reproduce this with the automobile question, but asking ChatGPT-4o about the inventor of TV yields different answers: Asking in German yields Paul Nipkow and Philo Farnsworth, asking in English yields Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird Asking about Radio inventors in German yields Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, Marconi, Fessenden. In English it yields Marconi and Tesla.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  Thats actually more interesting that LLMs answer based on language questions are asked, I never thought to test that. It would be nice if we got to a point where you train an LLM to genuinely figure out these nuances and fix its own model.
  - Sam6late 2y ago
    Google, I suspect, would do the same, if you were in Texas coffee's origin would not get you the result that mentions Yemen, Ethiopia would be the first result. This is how I won a $100 bet with a Texan who insisted that google gave him Ethiopia. The trouble is, we were in the Middle East when asking google for the bet.
- readingnews 2y ago
  I have not actually heard that argument. It has always been noted that Benz invented the car, and Ford invented the assembly line, for cars.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    Yeah, as an American I never was taught that Ford invented cars. He invented cheap cars.
  - mr_toad 2y ago
    He was the first to mass produce cars. But given that cars and mass production already existed it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to mass produce cars.
bane 2y ago
If it makes you feel better, in the U.S. we learn that the Wright brothers used Lilienthal's glider data extensively in the R&D phases of their work. He managed to gather a lot of data on gliders and glide slopes which informed the brothers' earlier work. Their achievement summits their peers only in qualifications, the first: - powered - controlled - heavier than air - sustained - flight
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The Wrights did use Lilienthal's data for their earlier gliders, but it turned out to be off by a factor of 2. That is why the Wrights built a wind tunnel to determine the correct values.
ricksunny 2y ago
Lol - when I studied aerospace in France the hagiography literature was all about Louis Breguet and Louis Bleriot. I don't recall mention (i.e. in general conversation, offhand references in non-formal literature, or on posters, etc.) about the Wright brothers. Oddly I don't recall much mention of Alberto Santos-Dumont either so, go figure.

lupusreal 2y ago

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.

db48x 2y ago
And they only used a wooden rail the first year at Kitty Hawk, when they only had a glider. They had decided to tackle the problem of control first and propulsion later. The glider took off by sliding downhill on a rail, while the Flyer they built the next year took off under its own power on level ground. Not only that, but they were the first to realize that the tables of lift published by whatshisname the French guy were bogus. They built a wind tunnel so that they could make their own measurements of lift and drag. Weirdly, the wind tunnel had been invented ~50 years earlier! Apparently most of the Europeans who were playing with gliders that whole time didn’t even know about wind tunnels or they might have thought to put two and two together.
shaky-carrousel 2y ago
It seems like the propellers worked fine. > On 23 October, Santos-Dumont presented himself at Bagatelle with the Oiseau de Proie II, a modification of the original model. The plane had been varnished to reduce the porosity of the fabric and increase lift. The rear wheel had been removed. In the morning he limited himself to manoeuvring the aircraft across the field, until the propeller shaft broke. It was repaired in the afternoon, and the plane was moved into position for an official attempt. An expectant crowd was present. At 4:45 pm, Santos-Dumont started the engine.[107] The plane lifted off and flew for 60 metres,[26]: 18 without taking advantage of headwinds, ramps, catapults, slopes, or other devices. The flight had taken place solely by the aircraft's own means, and Europeans at the time believed it was the first such achievement.

stzsch 2y ago

Also radio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura

maratc 2y ago
The correct link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Popov_(physicist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Popov_(physicist) of course :)

fermigier 2y ago

If you're French, it's Clément Ader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader

317070 2y ago
Or the Montgolfier brothers! That was the first time humans went up in the air. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers I was surprised the first time I heard Americans attribute flight to the Wright brothers. (For reference, I was educated in Belgium)

idoubtit 2y ago

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.

xoa 2y ago
I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. And how the pieces come together can change the course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016 and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down. You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.

pjc50 2y ago

Relatedly, who invented the television? Marconi or Baird?

knicholes 2y ago
Neither. Farnsworth did. Maybe you're asking about the radio, was it Marconi or Tesla?
- figomore 2y ago
  Also Roberto Landell de Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
  - UncleSlacky 2y ago
    And John Logie Baird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#First_public_demonstrations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#First_public_...
- NikkiA 2y ago
  There's a decent argument that Bain invented it as facsimile in the 1840s and everything from there on til the introduction of commercial television was essentially just refinement until it produced a high enough frame rate and without wires.

tomohawk 2y ago

[dead]

upofadown 2y ago

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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron

TeMPOraL 2y ago
I"m starting to wonder when, if ever, patents did not hinder technological advancement on the net.
- kube-system 2y ago
  When the development of the innovation requires a bunch of up-front capital.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  Various improvements to machinery during the industrial revolution were only possible with vast amounts of investment upfront, and the patent system made that possible. You're not going to be building a factory powering steam engine at home, even if you've found a method that will increase its efficiency by a significant margin. Of course, patents are only respected when a country is in the lead. Early America was notorious for espionage and strategically ignoring patents to bolster its own economy, and China doesn't really care about what patents you may have when one of their companies is competing with you.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Related, a good article on how a contributing factor to the founding of Hollywood as the world's movie capital was due to Thomas Edison's stranglehold on patents: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/ https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-th...

adev_ 2y ago

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 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.

clan 2y ago
Santos Dumont had close competition by Jacob Ellehammer[1] who is probably only (mostly) known locally. But truly pioneers: Building planes, helicopters and cars totally from scratch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Ellehammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Ellehammer

mkl 2y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

troyvit 2y ago
There's a great No Such Thing as a Fish podcast episode that talks about him: https://audioboom.com/posts/8641985-no-such-thing-as-a-honey-badger-on-toast https://audioboom.com/posts/8641985-no-such-thing-as-a-honey...

weeksie 2y ago

The Kiwis too have their own "invented the airplane" guy (Pearse?) Seems a lot was happening at that point in history.

deleted 2y ago
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Nursie 2y ago

And in New Zealand you may credit Pearse - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

arnaudsm 2y ago

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.

throw0101c 2y ago

There's an article that goes over various claims: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...

deleted 2y ago
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readthenotes1 2y ago

1907 in France (by a Brazilian) vs 1903 in the USA

newsuser 2y ago

Also, if we are talking X-rays, in Ukraine it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Puluj 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).

Beijinger 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal

s_dev 2y ago

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.

Symbiote 2y ago
That one is a little different, as both Poland and the UK considered breaking the Enigma machine a state secret until the 1970s. That Polish mathematicians broke the codes, and shared this information with the British, is taught in the UK. My understanding (from school in England) is the British codebreakers' contribution was to scale up the scale of the codebreaking, by using lots of machines and their own mathematical innovations.

gcanyon 2y ago

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_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...

Aardwolf 2y ago
This one is very steampunk (and batman) like! It's also literally steam powered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Avion_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Avion_III

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal )

tdullien 2y ago
And Konrad Zuse invented the computer.
- addandsubtract 2y ago
  and Karl Benz the car.
  - akie 2y ago
    And they did! They both literally did.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  And the computer mouse was not invented by Douglas Engelbart at Xerox PARC, but by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken: > https://www.heise.de/news/Auf-den-Spuren-der-deutschen-Computermaus-216255.html https://www.heise.de/news/Auf-den-Spuren-der-deutschen-Compu... > https://www.zeit.de/news/2019-05/14/deutscher-erfinder-gibt-ur-pc-maus-ins-museum-190514-99-215820 https://www.zeit.de/news/2019-05/14/deutscher-erfinder-gibt-... > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Mallebrein https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Mallebrein Quote from the first link: "Vor einem knappen halben Jahr feierte die Technikwelt den 40. Jahrestag der "Mother of all Demos", die am 9. Dezember 1968 die Computermaus an die Öffentlichkeit brachte. Demo-Leiter Douglas Engelbart gilt seitdem als Erfinder des immer noch genialsten und griffigsten Eingabegeräts der Informatik. Diese Ansicht muss jedoch korrigiert werden, denn schon einige Wochen vorher erschien eine Publikation der Firma Telefunken, die ein Input-Instrument vorstellte, das an Monitoren hing und funktionell der Engelbart-Maus gleichkam: die so genannte Rollkugel. Seit den frühen 70er-Jahren wurde sie zusammen mit Telefunken-Rechnern verkauft und in der Praxis eingesetzt, und mindestens ein Exemplar hat in einem Museum überlebt." Google Translate: "Almost half a year ago, the technology world celebrated the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos," which introduced the computer mouse to the public on December 9, 1968. Since then, the demo's leader, Douglas Engelbart, has been considered the inventor of what is still the most ingenious and handy input device in computer science. This view, however, must be corrected, because a few weeks earlier, a publication by the Telefunken company appeared, introducing an input device that hung from monitors and was functionally equivalent to the Engelbart mouse: the so-called trackball. Since the early 1970s, it was sold alongside Telefunken computers and used in practice, and at least one example has survived in a museum."

conartist6 2y ago

They didn't even mention the name "Lilienthal" who the Wright Brothers knew to have flown a heavier than air craft before they did...

nashashmi 2y ago

In other places, Abbas ibn Firnas is taught as the inventor of flight (glide) in 9th century. https://mideast.unc.edu/flight-of-fancy/ https://mideast.unc.edu/flight-of-fancy/.

delichon 2y ago

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.

bane 2y ago

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.

mannykannot 2y ago
When Wilbur Wright first demonstrated his airplane (a Model A somewhat modified while repairing the damage caused in shipping) in Le Mans, it was immediately apparent to the mostly enthusiastic crowd that this was the first fully controlled flight any of them had seen - a tight two-mile circuit with a controlled landing near the launch point. Many of those present would have been well acquainted with what Santos-Dumont and other pioneers had previously achieved.

OnACoffeeBreak 2y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#State_rivalry

engineer_22 2y ago

Somebody at WaPo taking a stand against Bezo's "America, liberty, innovation" memo

kshahkshah 2y ago

I highly recommend this book: Sky High!: A Soaring History of Aviation especially for those with children as a fun illustrated history of the individuals and their contributions to making modern aviation possible today. Suffice to say and as other commenters said, no one individual or pair of individuals made the airplane.

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shawabawa3 2y ago
you got it backwards Ohio: Birthplace of Aviation (wright brothers born/lived in Ohio) North Carolina: First in flight (first powered flight was in NC)

ninalanyon 2y ago

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.

bisRepetita 2y ago
Then I'll claim Leonardo da Vinci almost did it with his aerial screw in the 15th century ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw

desdenova 2y ago

The wright brothers invented a slingshot, not an airplane.

1970-01-01 2y ago

>“They didn’t take off on their own,” said Márcio Bhering Cardoso, the former director of the Brazil’s national aerospace museum. “They needed help.” Let's also discount all rocket launches near the equator, as this is also cheating.

jstanley 2y ago

The inventor of the aeroplane (to the extent that the question even has an answer) doesn't depend on what country you're in! How many legs does a dog have if I call it's tail a leg?

pjbk 2y ago

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://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344143803/date https://archive.org/details/larophile08besa https://archive.org/details/larophile08besa

nailer 2y ago

> 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.

mannykannot 2y ago

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.

culi 2y ago
It feels like every country has it's own "we actually invented airplanes" story. Growing up I heard form my parents, who are from a little-talked about country, claim that their country was the one that invented airplanes. I think it's similar to the lightbulb. The availability of certain other technologies allowed for an explosion in invention leading to many simultaneous "discoveries" of the same basic inventions. In the US it seems we prioritize the documentation through the patent system to ascribe credit

archeantus 2y ago

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.

brolumir 2y ago

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.

jeroenhd 2y ago
I think it's pretty obvious in hindsight that the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here. The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets. Putting a man on the moon showed that America was vastly more capable on a technical level, but that wasn't really the point of the space race. It's also why governments are carefully watching North Korea's space program, even if they'll never be able to put a man on the moon. Their ability to launch a sattelite into orbit makes them a threat, whether or not they can make a moon lander has little real value beyond vanity.
- mlyle 2y ago
  > The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets. The US and the Soviets had operational ICBMs at pretty much the same time-- dueling milestones from 1957 to 1959. Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs. Then the US caught up and surpassed them. Then both stagnated; Russia did a slightly better job in choosing priorities for human spaceflight; the US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight.
  - jandrese 2y ago
    > Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs. In the US the story is that because Soviet nukes were more crude than the US versions, which made them heavier and bulkier so the Soviets had to build their rockets bigger to have enough range. When the focus shifted to putting a man in orbit having a larger rocket to start with was an advantage and allowed the Soviets to achieve a number of firsts. I do agree that declaring the race suddenly over with a man on the moon was a case of taking the ball and going home.

jldugger 2y ago

Relatedly, just listened to one of the oldest Engines of Our Ingenuity episodes: 32 -- Wright and Langley. > Curtiss went to work, strengthening the structure, adding controls, reshaping it aerodynamically, relocating the center of gravity -- in short, making it airworthy. In 1914 he flew it for 150 feet, and then he went back and replaced the old motor as well. On the basis of Curtiss's reconstruction, the Smithsonian honored Langley for having built the first successful flying machine.[...] In 1942 the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Abbot, finally authorized publication of an article that clearly showed the Langley reconstruction was rigged. https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/32 https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/32

WalterBright 2y ago

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.

hathawsh 2y ago
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.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  See "The Wright Brothers as Engineers" by Quentin Wald https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-Experience/dp/0970607504 https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-E...
- lcfcjs6 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - QuantumGood 2y ago
    I do NOT think it is AI-generated (though it might be), and that belief could be part of why you are being downvoted. I've been watching the sentiment on AI-related comments for a while. It seems to have somewhat turned back to "if it's useful, it's okay" as long as it isn't promoted as AI.

pig_dog 2y ago

Beat the paywall link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250324104124/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/21/brazil-airplane-wright-brothers-santos-dumont/#expand https://web.archive.org/web/20250324104124/https://www.washi...

deleted 2y ago

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layman51 2y ago

The way the headline is written reminds me of a popular theory in Mexico that Thomas Alva Edison was born in Zacatecas State in Mexico.

citrin_ru 2y ago

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 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.

NelsonMinar 2y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman_Gilmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman_Gilmore

randunel 2y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traian_Vuia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traian_Vuia

alborzb 2y ago
>> He is credited with a powered hop of 11 m (36 ft) made on 18 March 1906 Revisionist History like this fascinates me. It is very well documented, with written texts, witnesses and even a handful of photographs that the Wright brothers had functional manned aircraft 3 years prior in 1903... Yet I've personally seen Romanian postal stamps that credit Vuia with "the first flight" for him managing to jump just 11m (36 ft) in a plane.
- randunel 2y ago
  If jumping off a cliff (or a steep dune, like the wright brothers did) counts as flying, then it's been done many times before mankind, even. The first actual flight, with the aeroplane taking off and flying instead of a human jumping off a cliff/dune, was Vuia's. You cherry picked the wrong quote, read the entire articles.

toasterlovin 2y ago

I think a separate and (to me, at least) more interesting question is why the US seems to have been (and is still now) so good at commercializing and deploying new technologies.

rtkwe 2y ago
Depends on when you're talking about, imo post WW2 so much happened here because we survived the war pretty much entirely intact so our industry could continue to boom while the rest of the world rebuilt. That's always been my prevailing theory about the rabid success of the later half of the 20th century.

lsh123 2y ago

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_Airplane/Who_Was_First/Santos_Dumont/Santos_Dumont.htm https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_...

cubefox 2y ago

Similar: Who invented the automobile, telephone, computer? The answer likely depends on your country of origin.

Animats 2y ago

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines

gorfian_robot 2y ago

New Zealand did it first! https://vimeo.com/ondemand/forgottensilver https://vimeo.com/ondemand/forgottensilver

aj7 2y ago

Brings to mind Feynman’s takedown of the Brazilian educational system in the 60’s.

fabiofzero 2y ago

I believe Santos Dumont did it because: 1. Spite 2. He was a much cooler person The US has claimed much more for much less in the past don't @ me.

jeleh 2y ago

The truth is: We will never know for sure. Have a look at the German aviation pioneer "Gustav Weißkopf" aka "Gustave Whitehead": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead

tdiff 2y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Landsberg#Discovery_of_the_combinational_scattering_of_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Landsberg#Discovery_of...

teleforce 2y ago

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer

presentation 2y ago
Don’t know about the rest of the world, but many regional flights in the Americas are operated on Embraer planes. My sense is they are dominant for smaller jets rather than long haul flights/military aircraft like the ones you listed.

jonny_eh 2y ago

This farmer in New Zealand also apparently invented powered flight first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

merman 2y ago

This thread seems like a good example of how to subtly be negative and breed cynicism. Nitpick (see pedantic and mostly irrelevant replies to the excellent top comment. Who cares, anyway? Whatabout all the other things that have ever happened? (see 2nd comment, 3rd comment) More nitpicking, 4th comment Top comment, and further down, the comments and discussion are quite good. I do wonder about how large an impact a targeted, small amount of astroturfing can accomplish. just boost/inject some cynicism and negativity into the top 2-4 comments, nothing too obvious. Just enough to poison the well a bit.

deleted 2y ago

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drweevil 2y ago

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.