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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.)
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
Anybody can land. The good ones can land twice.
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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)
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.
Which, in the case of your grandmother, would be a very long sentence indeed.
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
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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!
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.
I think what this conversation is really about is the role of US in international affairs. It's a nationalistic thing - "we invented X! Y is teh bestest nation!" and so countires play tug of war with different accomplishments. I say let's leave politics to the politicians, and keep the facts where they belong!
Landing twice doesn't take skill - just inertia.
Landing in a way that you can walk away from it takes skill.
A good landing is one you walk away from. A great landing is one where you can use the airplane again.
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Sorry—busted. After in-depth analysis, I determined that Jesus is a poor lifting body and, indeed, aerodynamically unstable. It would have been difficult for him to maintain altitude, much less ascend to heaven.
The most likely explanation is mistaken identity; perhaps the crowd saw Mecha-Jesus, who, as is commonly known, possesses greek fire rocket boots and a deployable rogallo wing.
Alternatively, if Jesus was still crucified, it would have been possible to construct a simple (albeit extremely large) diamond kite—possibly from high-strength silk fabric imported from the orient. This would still, however, not meet the requirement of powered, controlled flight.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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
...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.
The first Wright flyer was a joke. Didn't have enough power to lift off the ground; didn't even have wheels, just skids. It was only controllable in a very limited way. They didn't fly figure eights for another couple of years. They were also secretive, didn't share their ideas, and in fact refused to give demonstrations to prospective buyers without a deposit. People back in Cleveland did see some of their experimental flights between Kittyhawk and later public demonstrations, but not many; they were pretty secretive.
And the Wright brothers had almost no impact on aviation after that first flight. They preferred to sit on their heels and wait for the world to come to them. Everyone else was out experimenting in public and advancing the state of aircraft design. They were one hit wonders and contributed almost nothing beyond that first flight, and a famous demonstration in Paris in 1908 (maybe 1906). After that, nothing. What they are secondly famous for is their patent battles with the world, which were only settled by the US government strong arming everybody into sharing patents because they wanted to buy military aircraft for WW I in 1917.
The Wright Bros, along with James Watt, are great examples of the counter productive nature of patents.
Infuriate left and right
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. 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.
Wright Bros could bank and turn in there aircraft, there had been fixed wing aircraft before them but there was no way of turning it. That's is the difference getting off the ground and controlling once you were airborne. Unless one of the others can prove you could do more that go up and down in a straight line, I have to say Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Wing warping gave it to the Wright Brothers more than anything else.
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.
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.
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When the Wright Flyer was shown in Paris, they took off towards a line of trees, when they changed course in mid-flight, the French had to admit they had won the race. Getting a fix wing aircraft off the ground wasn't that hard, getting it to turn was.
It was in Reims, 1908. The Champagne companies sponsored a flight week there. I completely agree with the rest. The Wrights were maybe not the first in powered flight, but certainly the first aviation patent trolls in history.
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
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!
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From Wikipedia: "Nevertheless, enthusiasts in the U.S. and Germany built and flew near-replicas of Whitehead's 1901 flying machine beginning in the 1980s, using modern engines."
Ergo, these demonstrations demonstrated very little beyond that the original airframe may have been airworthy.
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)
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So how can we ensure inventors can cooperate freely, and build up on one another's ideas? I know! Patents!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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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.
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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.
It had wing-warping AND a vertical fin.
Right, it's worth reading the full article.
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.
You, sir, are an idiot.
Do a little actual historical research ... visit a library. Ever hear of the Wright B Flyer??
1910. Their FIFTH practical design. (Flyers I, II, and III, Model A, Model B) Landing gear, elevator at the rear, capable of carrying a PASSENGER, and produced in quantity, not a "one-off" experiment. Sold under contract to various branches of the U.S. military. And you can take a ride on one anytime you like at the Wright Brothers airport in south Dayton, Ohio.
Furthermore, in the years between 1903 & 1910, the Wrights flew ALL THE TIME around the Huffman Prairie fields, just a couple of miles outside of the Dayton city limits. ANYONE could lean against the fence & watch them go. (Again, do some light reading on the subject.)
"Secretive"? Hardly.
See you space cowboy
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.
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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.
Exactly; this is the story as it was told to me too. There were other airplanes before the Wrights', but they took off, flew a bit, and then crashed. The Wrights' was the first one that was decently controllable in flight, and amazed the crowds in Paris by turning and banking and landing safely, rather than just crashing like the others. The Wrights didn't invent heavier-than-air powered flight, they made the first controllable airplance.
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".
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The summary forgot to mention Richard Pearse as well.
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!
Look, there were a lot of early aviation pioneers, and they all helped contribute to the field. Having nationalistic fights over which of them was "first" under some specific criteria isn't important. What's important is remembering that the Mario brothers kicked the Wright brothers' asses.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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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Pictures or it didn't happen.
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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.)"
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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
With a 10HP engine of the size and weight of engines of that era?
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Read the article. The acetylene powered external combustion engine weighed only 30 pounds. A tour de force for the day, and not shabby for a home-built engine even today.
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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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Try reading without bias. The wheel engine was smaller, and once in the air its power was transferred to the propeller.
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Careful study of the Viking's decades in North America can shed light on modern events. For example, we know now that the Vikings established themselves in N.A. during a warm period, but couldn't maintain their settlements when the climate turned colder. Think about that the next time someone bleats about global warming.
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So wing-warping was one of the things included in "The Wrights got all of it right"? And biplanes, with baling wire strung everywhere, disturbing airflow? And a pusher engine?
The Wrights did a lot of things properly, and their disciplined approach gained them acclaim at a critical time.
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By the time the Great War had started, European aviation was greatly ahead of the USA's efforts.
Thanks to a Santos Dumont's invention, the Demoiselle (Google translation), which was released to the public domain by the author.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
I know it is fashionable to blame patents for all the ills that plague humanity
No, no, on slashdot it's copyright which is to blame for all the ills that plague humanity.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
And if you can't have competitors "build" challengers, just how the hell are you going to have big purse competitions?
Wright Flyer vs Wright Flyer?
Actually, now there is some antecdotal evidence the Phoenicians/Greeks may have reached the Americas before the vikings
Just like with software, now. The Wrights got most of their ideas from others, and slapped patents on it all. Whitehead was using the "wing warping", which was the keystone of the Wright patents in later years. So they tried to bury him. Hence, the agreement with the Smithsonian.
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!
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