Oh, I'm convinced that if the Wrights had disappeared in a kiln explosion, the solution to powered, controlled flight would have been developed within another 5

Oh, I'm convinced that if the Wrights had disappeared in a kiln explosion, the solution to powered, controlled flight would have been developed within another 5 years or so. The canard design was the result of the Wrights being terrified of a stall like that which killed Lilienthal. And they were correct that the canard made for a quicker response to a stall. But it was also the source of pitch instability, and was eventually dropped. Lilienthal died in 1896. The Wrights started the project by collecting every paper they could find on aeronautical engineering. The shortcomings of the existing research are evident in the fact that the Wrights still had to develop a series of prototypes, each designed to solve a particular aspect of flight. They put the solutions all together in the 1903 Flyer.