On Thu, 24 May 2001, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
>
> I still stick to these constraints. *public*, for example,
> is something that the world of science has been struggling
> to enforce; for example, we have _Cardano's Equation_, even
> though it was basically Tartaglia's.
Funny, I wasn't aware that the degree of publicity had the power to
reverse the direction of time... We're not dealing with a scientific
dispute here, though--it's a dispute of history and technical definition.
The historical question is, did the Wright Bros. do what they claimed when
they claimed? We have enough evidence to say, definitively, yes.
> I never said it was falsified. It's just - well - irrelevant.
> Nobody knew about that except long after the time.
Again--the fact that the Wright Brothers were little known doesn't alter
the course of time. Their work *was* known in their local community in
Ohio, where they got a little press coverage from local papers at
demonstrations and test flights, etc. The only difference is that nobody
cared what anybody in Ohio did at the time, whereas everybody cared what
happened in Paris.
> > The comparison is obvious: the Wright brothers were the
> > equivalent of a no-name startup company, whereas
> > Santos-Dumont was the equivalent of Microsoft.
> >
> I think in the future using MICROS~1 in an argument will
> be similar to using <that other Evil guy>...
I'm not sure that the analogy holds, but it basically boils down the fact
that Santos-Dumont benefited from superior publicity and cash, not from
the prior achievement of heavier-than-air flight.
Let's put it this way: if you invented a new widget, and started trying
to patent and sell it, and because you have no particular clout it
was a very slow process...and then 3 years later Microsoft (or IBM, or
DuPont) made a huge marketing splash with a slightly more polished widget,
but also claimed to be the first to discover how to make such
widgets at all...would you still insist that you were there first?
> >
> But being self-launched is that distinguishes an airplane
> from a glider.
Not the *only* thing, though. Gliders are specifically designed to ride
air currents; the Wright Flyers weren't. Gliders don't have engines and
propellers that can make them go for upwards of 20 miles on their own
power; the 1905 Flyer did. Adding wheels and a stronger engine is a
superior refinement, but it adds nothing to the essential *principle* of
self-powered heavier-than-air flight.
We can quibble over the importance of self-powered takeoff, I suppose...I
know that Brazil's been doing it for decades. :-) But consider this:
The Wright Flyer needed an artificial, exterior aid to get into the air,
true...but so does a commercial jet. It needs that big, long,
artificially flat runway, without which about all it can do is get bogged
down in gopher holes. Does a Boeing 737 cease to be an airplane when
it's parked on grass?
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
