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For Jane's, Gustav Weißkopf's 1901 Liftoff Displaces Wright Bros.
gentryx writes "Newly found evidence supports earlier claims that Gustave Whitehead (a German immigrant, born Gustav Weißkopf, with Whitehead being the literal translation of Weißkopf) performed the first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight as early as 1901-08-14 — more than two years before the Wrights took off. A reconstructed image shows him mid-flight. A detailed analysis of said photo can be found here. Apparently the results are convincing enough that even Jane's chimes in. His plane is also better looking than the Wright Flyer I." (And when it comes to displacing the Wright brothers, don't forget Alberto Santos Dumont.)
nah, nah. boo, boo.
That is rowboat with some kind of wings attached. Not flying wings but insect wings. Is this some kind of joke?
First use of Unicode characters in Slashdot?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
simple as that
Really, what's the point? Go create something new and stop wasting our time...
It's not just about discovery, but about sharing that discovery. Lots of people made it to the Americas before Columbus, but because his discovery of it became well known, he gets credit. If I invent practical cold fusion in my back yard but never share that, well, then I deserve to be forgotten.
let's not forget Richard Pearse too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
Has a deal to display one of the early Wright flyers. The deal stipulates that the Smithsonian MUST present the Wright brothers as the first. Period.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead
"When the Flyer was finally brought back and presented to the Smithsonian in 1948, the museum and the executors of the Wright estate signed an agreement (popularly called a "contract") in which the Smithsonian promised not to say that any airplane before the Wrights' was capable of manned, powered, controlled flight.[37][note 5] This agreement was not made public."
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That looks like an absolute fake... I'd love the engineering analysis to show if that things could conceivably fly.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
That picture and the story that goes with it are a joke, right? It's a couple weeks early.
...but controlled flight? No.
From the Wikipedia article linked in the summary, it seems like one of his runs promptly crashed into a building with the steam engine powering the craft badly scalding Gustav himself. This pretty much ended his experimental flights, as whatever method that was devised to control his aircraft was obviously insufficient.
The Wright flyer on the other hand had full control (pitch, yaw, and roll) as far as modern flight is concerned. It could do figure 8 turns and could go back around to land where it started. Quite important, since being able to land has more to do with having a safe flight than anything else.
Might be overly critical, but from the picture it looks an awful lot like that thing is gliding off the top of a hill. That's quite a bit different than lifting off of a flat surface.
How "reconstructed" is that photograph, anyway? That fence in the foreground looks weird.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
People have been following this for over 100 years now and there is nothing new to report. Please let us move on to more pressing topics, like the weather -- hottest years in last 11,000 - yeah, that's more relevant.
When Cletus Leadbetter's whiskey still exploded in October 17 1893 it's said he flew a half mile and was able to control his flight by flapping his coat. They are still debating whether his coat flapping was to control his flight or to put out his burning backside.
Reads like someone intentionally trying to sound more intelligent. All the commas and hyphens are a sign that the writer is quiet incapable of making an eloquent, simple point.
I wouldn't put any trust in the opinion of such an imbecile.
The Wright Brothers flew the first practical airplane in 1905, the Flyer 3. It was able to takeoff, perform controlled flight, and land under its own power and control. That is enough worthly place in history. However, there weren't many customers, competitors quickly surpassed the Wright Brothers, and had they had many patent disputes. Maybe they should have started a law office instead of a bicycle shop.
I watched a multi-part documentary on TV about the development of aircraft, emphasis on military aircraft, but there was talk about the Wright Bros and Santos-Dumont also. What I particularly remember is that one commentator said that while others were getting things off the ground, it was the Wright Brothers who understood the inherit instability of a plane. Others thought of a plane as a bit like a boat in the water, but the Wrights had been bicycle mechanics, and knew that one had to constantly control a bicycle, and they studied how birds, for example, had to constantly adjust their wings. What impressed people at the 1908 Paris Air Show wasn't just that the plane flew, but that it was so maneuverable, doing figure 8s, that kind of thing.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I'm always on the lookout for widespread misconceptions, but this attempt to overthrow conventional wisdom doesn't pass the smell test. Aside from the lack of contemporary evidence (computer-generated imagery doesn't count) and the absurd claims of his supporters (included a *steam-powered* plane in 1899, with crew of two including a stoker), there is this puzzling question: Why did the man who supposedly pioneered powered flight in 1901 or 1902 file only one patent which was for an *unpowered* "aeroplane" in 1905? I think his tendency to use the word "aeroplane" for gliders may be the source of some the continued confusion.
the Mythbusters! If Adam and Jamie can't make that thing fly, no one can.
I was the first to travel by flight. I have a photo of me after I used my Tardis to travel back to ancient Greece.
If it weren't for those terrible story tellers who couldn't get it right I would have been remembered.
stfu
Lawrence Hargrave
I can agree with every one of their photo interpretations, except for the important one. That one, to me, looks like a plane suspended in a room (or, maybe, held up by several people). In other words, it looks like an exhibit, not a plane in flight.
... it's falling. With style.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Slashdot gets punked yet again.
I don't know if the Wright brothers were first or not. But, I do know that this "re-creation" is BS. I read TFA and carefully viewed the images. There is nothing that actually shows the darn thing flying and there are many clear photographs of it on the ground. Someone mentioned evidence in court. Well, I am an attorney and this case is a laugher!
Is it just a computer generated known-photo replication of this drawing from the original 1901 article stating he flew? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Whitehead_woodcut.jpg
Since both were based on Hargrave's box kite which had been firmly placed in the public domain by the inventor it would have been impolite to fence off the commons and patent derivatives of the design.
Few people know that when Columbus reached Hispaniola he couldn't get a berth because the harbor was filled with Vikings, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Chinese, etc.
And the Wright brothers couldn't get clearance from the tower due to all the other aviators being in the air already.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Keyword is "practical". The Wright brothers did not fly a practical plane. All that they did, was groundwork that helped others to develop a real, practical plane.
I'm not convinced that Gustaf did anything remarkable, nor am I convinced that he did NOT do anything remarkable. The images in the citations are not impressive. Someone would have to copy it, and make it fly, for me to be impressed.
Let's remember, there were snake oil salesmen by the thousands back in the day. And, rainmakers. And, yes, they even had politicians back then. I need a little proof before I believe the thing in those images actually flew. I don't even require that it's flight time equals that of the Wright brothers. Just get it off the ground, under it's own power, and I'll accept that it can fly. Fifteen feet, fifty feet, five hundred feet of flight - none of it can happen if the damned thing won't get off the ground.
I'm just not a snake oil purchaser. I want videos, photos, and eyewitnesses by the score.
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"The William J. Hammer Collection is located at the Smithsonian Institute, Researchers are denied access: Hammer Collection archival note denying access to researchers"
you would think that they would at least make copies available. What good are the photos if they are locked away in a vault where nobody can ever look at them?
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You mean like you did this morning?
I used to be
CSI would have enhanced those pictures enough to read the label on Gustav's clothing. Don't know why Jane's is sticking with blurry pictures when TV proves they can do better.
I don't think anyone literate in aviation history has ever disputed that people have "flown" before the Wrights. The problem they solved with controlled flight. The fact that they were able to get a lightweight engine built is interesting but really secondary. Lots of folks could have built a lightweight engine. What people need to credit the Wrights for is their pioneering work in aerodynamic engineering that led to controlled flight. This was their key contribution.
Seastead this.
Keyword is "practical". The Wright brothers did not fly a practical plane.
The Wright brothers had achieved flights of over 5 minutes with multiple circular paths around the field within a year of the first powered flight success. And they incrementally improved their designs and concepts over many years. They were truly engineers, not romantics, and based their development on research, science, testing and feedback. They were instrumental in the development of practical aircraft.
Oh, you mean wifi and body scans and free gin-and-tonics? OK.
And there are those who see the evidence that space flight existed thousands of years ago... So what is history but a claim that may or not be true but clearly written by those in a position of doing so.
Wasn't this already reported on Slashdot in 1901?
The dispute over *whom* was first aside, two states(North Carolina and Ohio) have tried to take credit for the Wright Brothers' invention. North Carolina provided the field, and Ohio provided everything else.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vimanas/vimanas.htm
the documentation on ancient "vimanas" is staggeringly comprehensive. the most-studied portions of these documents by westerners are those on metallurgy (and electro-magnetism). how to find the metal ores. how to mine them. how to build the crucibles and the furnaces needed to smelt the metals, and so on. (http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vimanas/vimanas21.htm)
what is simply beyond most western peoples' belief is that it would even be possible for the ancient indians to have this kind of technology, and the associated weaponry that goes with it.
however, as we learn more - including NASA learning about and independently rediscovering Mercury-driven Ion Drives - it kinda shames our european arrogance to think that we could possibly have been "the first" to discover powered flight. that's powered flight *in this era*, not first powered flight *ever*.
god help us when someone actually takes this ancient documentation seriously and starts reproducing some of the weaponry though.
A reconstructed image shows him mid-flight.
Well, yes, in the same sense that a still from Superman shows him in mid-flight too. As far as I can glean, there was an original photograph, from which a lithograph was made - and lithographers, it would seem from the article, commonly "re-imagined" such scenes for artistic purposes - replacing backgrounds, and the like. Based on other altered lithographs, someone has tried to "undo" these changes (which sounds a dubious method to say the very least) to give an idea of what the original photograph looked like.
I call shenanigans!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So what it boils down to is exactly how you define flight. Just like who built the first working, practical computer depends on what definition you use (Colossus/ENIAC). It's annoying but just one of those things we will probably never know with certainly, just like who first broke the sound barrier in level flight.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
> I'm just not a snake oil purchaser. I want videos, photos, and eyewitnesses by the score.
Yes you are, god damn it! You want to buy my god damn snake oil.
Good spotting! Looks like the umlauts got converted to the HTML encoding of Unicode automatically. I had totally forgotten to use the abominations of ß (for ß) and friends.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Enhance photo image. Lock me in that quadrant. There. RIGHT THERE. ENHANCE. CLEAR IT UP!
Why do they translate their names, that is sick.
Did you read the description of plane #21 (the one supposed to fly)..
It had two engines, one to power the wheels, and one the propellers, and the wheel one was shut off after takeoff.
So not only did he somehow create an engine powerful enough to fly a plane that early, but powerful enough twice over to fly a plane and the dead weight of a 2nd engine.. But only for that one airplane, because he never used those engines again in his later airplanes..
as plummetin!
1) Weight to lift surface ratio--I don't care how thin those boards are, it weighed too much.
2) Control--no way that wing configuration delivered control.
At best that thing might have glided a bit--but I doubt it even could do that.
Except this guy still thinks they are honoring the contract:
"To this day, the terms of employment of all employees of the Smithsonian Institute require them to say the Wrights flew first (a scandal reaching far beyond the history of aviation – negotiated history?)"
So they are honoring some parts of the contract, but not others? Riiiight.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
It's a shame Whitehead had to wait a century or more for CSI to develop the digital photo interpretation techniques to prove this. With wet plates and darkroom chemicals the magnify-enhance-magnify-enhance-zoom-enhance would have taken days if not weeks.
I'm not convinced. If the flight had been powered, the photos would not merely have been on the wall among many others, with no place of special interest. This argues that they indicate nothing special and that they show kites. Also, the description at the end of the article that mentions the sound of the wings flapping indicates the "flight" was that of a kite. He doesn't mention the obvious: the sound of an engine and what would have been the wap wap wap of a large slowly moving propeller or propellers. Mention chestnut trees, but not the most important part of powered flight, the powerplant. And as for the photo of an "engine," I believe it is an engine. What we have in this series of photos is a premature display of what Whitehead wanted to do in the future, that is, put THIS ENGINE into THIS KITE and produce POWERED FLIGHT! So, why would "journalists" (read men selling newspapers for a living) exaggerate what had actually happened? What did they have to gain? Newspaper sales. People buy newspapers to read about the extraordinary event, not just another kite flight. Been there, done that.
Using my massive human-powered image analysis program I came to the conclusion that there is a crowd in front of that image of a flying kite - a crowd complete with old-timey women's hats and men's bowlers - and if there had been a gasoline engine going and a propeller wapping I doubt they would have been that close.
Jane's is just bored and decided to engage in revising history (to sell.....).
E Proelio Veritas.
From now on all my bad photoshop hacks will be deemed as a "reconstructed image".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Given a reasonable budget, one helper, access to book/internet resources about wing design / aeronautic engineering but NO ALREADY-MADE PLANS, and a hardware store, how long would it take you to make a stable, steerable flying machine right now? I would guess several weeks even putting in long days. how much would it cost?
Jane's delivers, what is likely, a more accurate picture of history that will likely infuriate the Smithsonian and others wanting to perpetuate the myth that the Wright Brother's were first. Lets leave politics out of science and get to the real facts. If Whitehead was first, we need to acknowledge that.
There is a slight misconception concerning the invention of the airplane. A lot of people can claim that theirs was the first heavier than air, and mechanically driven airplane. Where these inventors failed is that they did not have good way of controlling where their invention went. The Wright brothers solved the problem of controlling the direction and altitude of the airplane. Without this critical part of the equation, true flight was just a dream.
That reminds me of an old aviators saying.
"Takeoffs are optional, Landings are mandatory!"
Also if you get that landing wrong, there are no more takeoffs for you!
And then there was Richard Pearse who flew 9 months before the Wright bros buy didn't consider the flight to be controlled enough.
Fran
:):):)
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Bigfoot and Saddam's WMD arsenal in those horribly blurry photos.
(Colossus/ENIAC).
Ahem, Zuse :-)
And for the aircraft lets have a mention of Richard Pearse. His plane at least looks the part (like a modern microlight).
Let me quote TFA: "...performing even longer flights, one including a full circle. (Flying a 360 circle was the accepted standard for proving an aircraft was controlable in early aviation.)"
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
The Vikings were we're the first documented Europeans to "discover", but what did it change? The migrations of the original American peoples and the later discovery by Columbus are what all of history turned on.
Yes, there were heavier-than-air machines that flew *before* the Wright brothers. Many of them were not that successful, but there was progress (and many people were trying many things). The brothers took a more pragmatic approach, mostly because they were bicycle mechanics and not well funded. If you are poor, you don't 'wing it and try' with the most expensive tries first, you must be more careful, building models, testing, putting numbers to paper. Their approach wound up being more successful. Its wrong to discount or dismiss all those who tried and died. Others put numbers on paper too, and studied the problem. The Wrights got all of it right. I know there are (a whole fat gob) who will argue that the others were all incompetent 'players' and the only ingenuity came from the Wrights, but that's a big fat bold faced lie.
Accurate history is very important. Although who made the first good airplane is relatively minor, letting tyrants escape the proper judgement of history is not minor. Lies should not be allowed to rest unchallenged.
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There was also Karl Jatho, who was at least a month earlier than the Wright brothers. Aside from a small statue in Hanover (Germany) there's not much reminiscence.
I'm just not a snake oil purchaser. I want videos, photos, and eyewitnesses by the score.
And if you manage to get any of those for an event that took place on 1901 I'd be very impressed, sir!
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...