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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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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.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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)
... 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?
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!
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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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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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
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.
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.