You forgot J. J. Montgomery, the father of basic flying. He flew a controlled glider in 1883. The Wright brothers read his book before designing their own successful flying machines.
Jeff _____ From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 2:52 PM To: vortex-L@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:The pattern of Historical Accounts OrionWorks wrote: Viewing an interesting Wikipedia article "First Flying Machines", See: HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_flying_machine"http://en.wikipedia.org/w iki/First_flying_machine lists a surprising number of people involved. That is interesting. Actually, many people who are not listed made important contributions, especially Chanute and Langley. It took me a while to figure out why they are not listed. It is because they themselves did not ride on man-carrying flying machines. Chanute helped design many machines (including the Wrights) and he wrote the most important book about aviation before Kitty Hawk, "Progress in Flying Machines." This is listed in the article, and available on line: HYPERLINK "http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/i/Chanute/library/Prog_Contents.htm l"http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/i/Chanute/library/Prog_Contents.ht ml Langley was the first to make a sustained flight with large powered model airplanes in 1895 and 1896. The Wrights read extensively, and they were close friends with Chanute, so they knew about earlier work. They gave generous credit to the people who came before them, including several not listed here who contributed only theories, or flew only models. I didn't see them mentioned in the Wiki article but I seem to recall that there had also been a federally funded U.S. project to build a powered plane. Millions of dollars were spent building a prototype only to see the results crash into a lake on its maiden flight. This refers to Langley's 1903 attempted flights. (On the Potomac River, not a lake.) Langley was the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The War Department contributed $50,000 and the Smithsonian came up with $20,000 for the project. That equals about $1.6 million in 2005 dollars. The flights were an utter failure, and were widely ridiculed in the press. The aircraft was much too fragile and it was not airworthy even if it had been stronger. It was a scaled-up version of the 1896 model. I do not think that Langley contributed much to aviation after 1896. See: HYPERLINK "http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf"http://lenr-canr.org/a crobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pierpont_Langley"http://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/Samuel_Pierpont_Langley What I'm leading up to here is the observation of a historical pattern where inventors of some new innovative technology, more often than not, have many, MANY competitors nipping at their heels. Official historical accounts, OTOH, tend to gloss over the many players & contributors who were simultaneously involved in the same quest. Official historical accounts often tend to focus on a single "winner" as if they the only game in town. In many cases this is true, but aviation happens to be a clear-cut case where there were no serious competitors. No one was close to the Wrights. Serious research petered out in the late 19th century after Lilienthal and Pilcher were killed. No one other than the Wrights had any decent wind-tunnel data, or a detailed grasp of the physics, or any ability to model aircraft for performance and stability, or any idea how to control an aircraft. As Crouch put it, in 1900, other than the Wrights the field was "moribund." Some modern engineers and historians say that other groups should have been closer, and engineering the airplane was not as difficult as people thought it would be. Talented engineers and scientists were discouraged because most people in 1903 were convinced that heavier-than-air flying machines were physically impossible. Simon Newcomb was the leading scientist who made this claim -- a 1903 version of Frank Close. He was a good physicist, but his reasons for claiming that flight is impossible were risible. We know that many talented engineers had enough skill to invent the airplane because after the Wrights work became widely known in 1908, many other people such as Sopwith and Sikorsky soon learned to make airplanes better than the Wrights'. I do not think Sikorsky had much original source information. I gather he independently reinvented things based on photographs and descriptions, rather than an in-person examination of the airplane or the 1906 patent. Still, the Wrights were fantastically talented as theoreticians, experimentalists, craftsmen and sportsmen. Modern experts consider them geniuses, "of the theoretical quality of Leonardo, Kepler, Copernicus, Einstein, or the practical inventiveness of Steinmetz and Edison." (H. Combs.) (I think Einstein is an exaggeration but Kepler or C. P. Steinmetz are reasonable comparisons.) They filled notebooks with advanced mathematics that no engineering undergraduate today would attempt without a computer, and their wind-tunnel design and data quality was not exceeded until the 1920s. Before they cut wood to construct the first propeller, they modeled it mathematically and predicted its performance correctly within 1%! In 1908, their competitors were using motors with five times the horsepower but such inferior propellers that they produced less thrust than the Wrights' propeller. Others might have discovered flight, but the Wrights did discover it. For that matter, others might have invented the transistor, but the people at Bell Labs did. Mizuno might have discovered cold fusion -- which was staring him in the face at one point -- but he didn't, and Fleischmann and Pons did. I know hundreds of people who are working on cold fusion, and many others who have worked on it but are now retired or dead. To be brutally honest, I think only a handful of these people have made original, important contributions. The others have done "me too" replications. But, you need a large crowd of people to make progress. A few people will stand out from the crowd, and you cannot predict who they will be. Even the person who makes the contribution is unaware of his or her ability beforehand; after their first disappointing glider flights of 1901, the Wrights predicted that man would not fly in their lifetimes. In the mid-19th century, a small group of artists painted splendid impressionist paintings, which are the most popular works in museums today. We can thank two things for impressionism: 1. The camera, which showed people how the world really looks for the first time in history, and 2. The immense popularity of painting at that time. That small group became famous, but hundreds of others painters did not become famous, including many enthusiastic amateurs. Without this vast crowd of artists, the geniuses would not have become interested in art in the first place, and they would not have been inspired or sustained by their fans. I'm wondering if official historical accounts may soon repeat itself, generating the same pattern of misleading information as we witness the race to build the first ZPE OU "motor." Let's wait to see if anyone actually makes a ZPE OU motor. I doubt it will happen. Unlike Newcomb and Close, I do not pretend to have sophisticated technical justifications for this belief. I doubt it because it is an apparent violation of the conservation of energy, because no one has done it yet as far as I know, despite strenuous efforts by lots of people. - Jed No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.10.2/894 - Release Date: 7/10/2007 5:44 PM No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.10.2/894 - Release Date: 7/10/2007 5:44 PM
