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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.)
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 is rowboat with some kind of wings attached. Not flying wings but insect wings. Is this some kind of joke?
No, it's conspiracy theorists at its best. Here's the actual analysis that went into the re-creation of the photo linked above:
http://www.gustave-whitehead.com/history/detailed-photo-analysis/
As you can see, it's pretty much the "computer... magnify, rotate, enhance" sort of photo manipulation that "proves" flight. Whitehead was definitely a pioneer in aviation. But there is absolutely no evidence he created a steerable machine or even understood differential lift to cause banking in a plane to accomplish a curved, controlled, coordinated turn in flight like the Wright machine was able to accomplish.
Other people had been in the air before flight in gliders and on ground effect. A Frenchman named Ader lifted off the ground (barely) first, to disastrous consequences earlier (he, too, based his plane on a bird/bat design instead of scientific analysis and was unable to control it in flight). It was actually the earlier failures of Ader, Langley, and others that caused so many problems when the Wrights tried to sell their planes to the US and French military, who had seen the earlier failures and couldn't believe a couple of bicycle mechanics had cracked the problems of efficient propellers, steering, proper wing camber, and usable controls.
It was only after there was competition from aircraft manufacturers trying to invalidate the Wright patent that all this prior art suddenly magically materialized. The Wrights never lost a case.
E pluribus unum
The reconstructed photo is a montage of known images stuck together to match the analysis of the highly magnified zoomed portions of the photos. Seriously.
Politics and penis-waving aside (though Whitehead lived in Connecticut when he built it, but anyway...)
Given the image, I'd love to see if someone actually managed to reconstruct the thing and see if it actually can fly... ah, wait - someone managed it )
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
If you RTFA, you'll see that Whitehead was using wing-warping as well, several years before the Wright Bros. How the Wright Bros. got their patents on wing-warping is a mystery.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Wright brothers patented a lot of the mechanics of the aircraft they built and later prevented Curtis & other US aviators from progressing. By the time the Great War had started, European aviation was greatly ahead of the USA's efforts.
I know it is fashionable to blame patents for all the ills that plague humanity but stagnation in the US aircraft industry prior to the US entry into the Great War was down to more than just patents. Most of the aviation advances in Europe were due to state aviation challenges that featured big purses, air racing and most importantly military expenditure on aviation. In Germany and France for example military spending was a key factor in the expansion of the pre-war aviation industry and a key factor in technological advancement prior to 1914. Even in 1910-1914 both the German/French armies and navies were ordering aircraft by the hundreds. The USA's expenditure in the same period was a joke and despite US industry eventually accepting massive orders to supply the UK and the French with aircraft, large portions of the US air service had to be equipped with aircraft by the French and the British including the entire US fighter fleet on the Western Front. Civilian aviation as a technological motivator only began to assume any degree of importance when Hugo Junkers wheeled out the all metal Junkers F13 in 1919 to everybody's surprise and people found it was more sophisticated technologically than contemporary military machines. Especially because the F13 prototype could lift well over half a metric ton on a salvaged 160hp Mercedes engine.