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(At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight
Rogue-Lion.com writes "Take a time out to remember the accomplishments of two bicycle shop owners who changed the world immeasurably, 100 years ago today. The Telegraph is running a story about a recreation of the Wright's (and world's) first heavier-than-air powered flight. President Bush will be in attendance at the event." Setting aside even more exotic theories, rod writes with an alternative point of view: namely, that man's first flight took place in New Zealand, on March 31, 1902. "I admire the U.S.A and the Wright brothers,but there are facts to consider today, 17/12/03, on the centenary of Kitty Hawk." Update: 12/17 13:44 GMT by T : Or was it a Brazillian invention? (Thanks,
Anderson Silva.)
Apparantly there are claims that the flight of the Wright Brothers was really just ballistic, i.e. not flight at all. Anyone?
I had never heard of the New Zealand flight until this story, seems like another case of the widely publisised achievement become the celebrated moment in history rather than the one that was actually first.
I know that colossus was because the project was a national secrect until reciently, but this doesn't seem to be the case for the first flight, can anyone shed any light on why nobody has made a fuss over this before? And are we going to see the history book re-written? Or will people just not accept that it and keep believeing the widely known truth? (most likely imo)
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My understanding of the New Zeeland flight was that getting corroboration was difficult at best. The NZ inventor / pilot didn't get the word out, there weren't a whole lot of witnesses, and the plane doesn't exist anymore. If anything, the Wright brothers were much better publicists.
What has always impressed me about the Wright brothers is that they were true engineers. Rather than tinker with bird-like models and pursue a try-it-and-crash-it development approach, they really decomposed the problem and systematically solved the major issues like power, lift, and control. They did not just build the first airplane, they designed it.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I guess this is something that we will not every know the "truth" of. It's interesting that despite the quote attributed to Pearse the website linked from the article (assuming it is accurate) paints a very different picture:
Mch 31, 1902 - First powered flight. Estimated distance around 350 yards. Similar to the first Wright Brothers flight, ie, in a straight line, and barely controlled.
Mch ? 1903 - After spending a year working on the engine, and tending to his farm, Pearce made another flight, this time with a distance of only about 150 yards.
May 2, 1903 - Distance unknown, but as usual the aircraft ended up stuck in a gorse hedge 15' off the ground!
May 11, 1903 - This, my opinion, [ie. the opinion of Bill Sherwood] was man's first real flight. Pearse took off along the side of the Opihi River, turned left to fly over the 30' tall river bank, then turned right to fly parallel to the middle of the river. After flying nearly 1,000 yards, his engine began to overheat and lost power, thus forcing a landing way down the dry-ish riverbed. One of the locals, Arthur Tozer, was crossing the river at the time and was rather surprised to have Pearse fly right over his head!
Could it be simply that Pearse didn't feel his achievment counted as real flight at the time despite, from the article anyway, it seems that his orginial flight was similar to the Wright brothers flight, and made earlier.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
Ahem>/A>...
If this is not the inventor of the plane, I do not know what this is.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
the first powered flight also occured in bridgeport ct in august of 1901.
any other first powered flights?
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There was a very interesting article in The Guardian yesterday, looking at the darker side of the history of the airplane. A particularly striking quote:
When Wilbur Wright was asked, in 1905, what the purpose of his machine might be, he answered simply: "War." As soon as they were confident that the technology worked, the brothers approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder.
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The irony of today's events in North Carolina is that Bush's attending of the events is shutting down all of the airports in the area because of a presidential movement TFR (temporary flight restriction)!
Presidential TFR
The event coordinators have obtained special clearance for the Wright flyer to fly, along with the other planes for the airshows, etc.
AvStop Magazine Online Researche arch.html
By Geoffrey Rodliffe
http://avstop.com/History/AroundTheWorld/NewZ/res
Wild and inaccurate statements have been publicised from time to time concerning Richard Pearse's achievements in the field of aviation. However. no responsible researcher has ever claimed that he achieved fully controlled flight before the Wright brothers, or indeed at any time. To attain fully controlled flight a pilot would have to be able to get his plane into the air, fly it on a chosen course and land it at a predetermined destination.
Obviously Pearse's short "hops" or "flights", whilst they established the fact that he could readily become airborne, did not come within this category, but neither, for that matter, did the first powered flights of the Wright brothers in December 1903. The Wiight brothers, however, had the resources necessary to continue their experimentation until they achieved fully controlled flight.
So, Richard Pearce may have flown a heavier-than-air craft a year earlier than the Wrights, but it was little publicized and did not have much of a follow-on.
Now, the other side of the coin.
I'm very surprised by the posters that say the Wright's flight was better publicized, because in fact the Wrights played their cards so close to the chest that, at the time, relatively few people heard of their flight.
Santos-Dumont's flight in October 23rd, 1906 in the "14-bis" took place very much in public, with the press and representatives of the French Aero Club in attendance, and was very widely attended. It was far more publicized than the Wright's flight and most people at the time thought it was the first heavier-than-air flight. To this day, there are still those (particularly, for some reason, French and Brazilians) who believe his flight is the one that should "count."
Really, what the Wright Brothers truly deserve credit for was the brilliant engineering, their aerodynamic studies, their wind tunnel work, their conceptualization of the problem as one of controllability rather than stability, and their conscious understanding of the importance of what would now be called a good "user interface." Their flight wasn't a stunt. Most important, unlike Santos-Dumont's flight, it did not depend on having a pilot of extraordinary skill.
Now, about Friese-Greene's invention of motion pictures...
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Could it be simply that Pearse didn't feel his achievment counted as real flight at the time
I imagine this might be because from the descriptions on the web site referenced, not a single flight ended in the craft being flight worthy. "Stuck in a gorse hedge" and "engine overheated and lost power" don't sound as if the plane could be taken back up into the air.
Now I might be incorrect (and this being Slashdot, I'm sure someone will correct me if am), but I don't believe the Wright Flier ended the "Historic" flight in a crash, or a forced landing. Perhaps that's why Pearse himself makes a distinction.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
My earlier post seemed to bring the anti-Wrights out of the woodwork. To address some of their points.
.nz and .br! Why didn't your guys start an aircraft industry there? Perhaps they did not invent a USEFUL flying machine.
1. It does not matter if someone else drew an airplane (Leonardo) or allegedly flew a few feet (Whitehead, et al). You have invented something WHEN THE THING ACTUALLY WORKS, not when you file a patent.
2. Every country seems to have its own local flying machine inventor. Good for you,
3. Taking off under its own power is not part of the definition of an airplane, so the fact the later Flyers used a catapult is not germane. F-14s don't take off with ony their own power from a carrier deck, do they?
4. The Wrights were reliably making long distance, cross country flights LONG before anyone else.
5. The Wrights invented the science of aerodynamics. That is, they did replicable experiments before anyone else figured out how.
Compared to all this, that Brazilian guy with his motorized balloon who buzzed around Paris is merely an endearing eccentric.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Ah yes, that is why Gustav Weisskopf used a clutch mechanism to shift the power from one engine to the other. He used this as a pseudo aileron LONG before the wrights even got their glider off the ground!
If you read carefully, the link provided only says that it was the film that was faked, not the existance of Pearce or his aircraft. Pearce, as far as I know, really did exist, and really did build that plain,according to articles like this and others. Just google it up. Hard to believe a faked film was the basis of evidence for several books on the subject.
On the other hand, one slashdot comment was that the Wright's had controled flight, but if this fellow had working ailerons, I suspect that his flight was controled. Rather one should say that the Wright brothers significantly advanced the science of flight, and for that, they deserve a significant place in the history of flight.
The illusion of a slowing of progress is caused by relative compression of time. Basically, the twenty years before you were born seem like much less time than the twenty years after you were born. Everything seems to have happened faster in the past, because you can cover the entire period in a couple of hours reading a book, whereas you're forced to wait while current events unfold.
Building something larger than before is not a very big challenge, so the 747 is not very interesting from a 'progress' point of view. More interesting is a more modern craft, like the 777, which is fly-by-wire, two-engined, and yet reliable enough to make long overwater flights.
Passenger craft in general are less interesting, because there are certain economic and political realities that are hard to get around. No matter how fast a given airplane can take you from airport A to airport B, your total travel time will still be at least three or four hours due to checkin time, security, seating, baggage, etc. The same thing goes for size; once you hit a certain size, it's better to just run planes more often than to get bigger ones, both because of cost and because of better scheduling flexibility.
The more interesting stuff is happening in the general-aviation sector and the military sector. Take military first: yes, they're still using F-14s and F-15s, as well as really old stuff like B-52s. But those (well, not B-52s...) are getting near their end of life. Thirty years is perfectly reasonable. At the same time, new models like the F-22 and the JSF are coming on line, both of which have very interesting features.
As far as general aviation goes, just look at yesterday's slashdot headlines: the X-Prize. There are a dozen groups in the world which are actually somewhat serious about putting people into space within the next year. I don't know how many of them are realistic, but the groups themselves are serious about it, which means that they must have at least some ability. That is really amazing! And sure, in a technical sense, it's nothing new; we've had the ability to put people in space for forty years. But the ability to do it without the amount of support and infrastructure that a national space program provides is incredible.
I don't dispute that things have slowed down a bit. Things moved really, really fast from about 1940 to 1960. But I do believe that our perceptions greatly exaggerate the slowdown. There are plenty of interesting things going on today.
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Apparently, because President Bush is expected to be at the ceremonies at Kill Devil Hill, All aviation activities in the vicinity are going to ceace. A special exception had to be made for the Wright Flyer Replica so that it would be allowed to leave the ground. Gosh, those new-fangled flying machines might hurt someone!
This article gives details and links to the actual NOTAM text published by the FAA. The practical upshot of all this is that we private aviators of this country are not welcome to the event.
I wonder what Orville and Wilbur Wright would have thought of this.
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Actually, in France (been living there for a while, talked to more of them than you could throw a frog at), if you ask anyone who the 'father' of the plane would be, most of them don't know much at all of Santos-Dumont. However, that Clement Ader invented the plane is questioned by none (and it is hard to question when the plane in question is still in the CNAM museum for all to see...). This thing actually flew in 1890, a whole decade and a half before other widely recorded successes such as Santos-Dumont's, and first proved the possibility for heavier-than-air flight.
/. seems more interested in the engineering history than national dick contests, which is good).
Which, of course, doesn't diminish in any way the extraordinary feat that the Wright brothers pulled, please don't take me wrong: no matter whose shoulders they were or weren't standing on, they're the ones who saw farther, and there is no questioning it their place in history for it. They didn't give up where others did.
It's just that Santos-Dumont was never a contender for the title of first man to fly, and not even the French claim so (although I can see people pretending that they do, for the sole sake of pointing out that the Wright brothers came before Santos-Dumont, and thus "Go us we invented the plane!", I suppose... but thankfully the average enlightened geek here on
If you're ever in Paris you may want to go see this thing in the CNAM museum. It's hanging from the ceiling over a large stairway. Extremely impressive sight.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
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Eventually he gave up because steam engines just didn't have the power-to-weight ratio and moved on to other things, such as breech-loading-cannons (the family has a letter from the Dept of the Navy telling him, if I remember, that they were impractical/impossible).
He started his work in England, and moved to the US. His assistant, Stringfellow, continued making models and is fairly well-known in early aviation history. You can find a reproduction of Stringfellow's gliders in the Franklin Institute in Philladelphia, and last I knew the Smithsonian had either an original glider or a full-size reproduction.
When we went to the Smithsonian in the mid-70's to donate his papers, they took us into the closed section (renovations) to show us "Henson's glider". My mother said "that's not his glider, that's Stringfellow's" (we had most of his original drawings).
When I was, oh, 11 or 12 I was interviewed by phone by the London Sun about him. They must have gotten our names from the Smithsonian I imagine.
William Samuel Henson"
If slashduh won't allow us to write international characters, then don't use "B" as a substitute for a German "eszett" or "double-S".
Weisskopf will do fine, in fora that aren't exclusively German.
("Weib" means "woman")
If somebody ever attempted to fly a replica of Pearse's "airplane", it's pretty obvious it would not fly. There was no airfoil to its wings, its engine produced only 15-22 HP, and had woefully inefficient propellers. Contrast this with the Wright Flyer, which had an efficient airfoil, very large lifting wing area, a 12 HP engine and a 90% efficient propeller, and still had barely enough power to get airborne. There's no way Pearse's alleged airplane could have flown. Too little power.
Maybe. But could it turn?
The Wrights discovered what is now called "adverse aileron yaw" and build their controls to compensate. The wing warping was actually control would also move the rudder to compensate for the adverse yaw. The F-16 uses a similar mechanism. :)
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-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
It is a shame that many general aviation pilots won't be able to attend!
If you want to get really pissed off about this, read "Unlocking the Sky" by Seth Shulman (sp?). It's a great read about the hoops Glenn Curtiss (a true aviation genius) had to jump through to avoid being bankrupted by the Wrights SCO-like patent tactics.
Totally destroyed any respect I might have had for the Wright brothers. They might have been very clever engineers, but they were also ruthless, greedy, selfish bastards. And don't you DARE tell me that's what America's all about.
: )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I can't help but wonder what people would be saying if the Wright brothers flew first, but didn't make a fuss about it, and then Pearse flew 6 months later, but did all the publicity schtuff. Would overall sentiment be that Pearse flew first? or would the Wrights be championed?