Here are the achievements of the Wrights with the 1903 Flyer:

1. First 3-axis flight controls

2. First propellor theory that was twice the efficiency of other airscrews

3. First aircraft engine that had twice the power/weight of other engines

4. First design that used a wind tunnel to get an efficient wing shape

5. First directed research and development program to identify the problems and solve them one by one, with the results culminating in the 1903 Flyer

6. Properly documented everything with photographs, notebooks and witnesses

7. The Flyer is hanging in a museum today, and exacting replicas have been built and flown exhibiting the same documented flight characteristics as the Flyer.

If you look at other contenders, they were all lacking these points. For example, with the Wright propellor, engine, and airfoil their craft had an enormous advantage over other designs that were trial and error.

All modern aircraft can trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, and no other claimant. The others were all developmental dead ends.

P.S. About the catapult thing - are airplanes launched from aircraft carriers not airplanes? Besides, the 1903 Flyer did not use a catapult.

I always argue that the Wright Bros are the USA's greatest engineer(s).¹ Planes today still use the same design (in fact, the Flyer is even better—a twisting wing is more efficient than ailerons, but we haven't figured out how to make titanium, aluminum & carbon fiber bendy like wood (yet)).

¹–my 2nd spot goes to John Moses Browning – also, whose 120+ year designs are not only still in use, they're still in production.

I would add in second place Skunkworks and the A12, which is the perfection of aviation technology in my opinion. It's just such an insane piece of technology, in every part you take a look at it gets more and more absurd of what's in that plane.

And if you build an airplane so absurdly advanced that 70+ years later people still think it was aliens that built it, you've set your mark in the history books.

Third place in my heart takes the Rutan Voyager [2] which essentially pushed its efficiency so hard that it coincidentally invented the design for modern delivery drones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager

Oh man, I love the A12 and its design is just amazing. It's the perfect aircraft 10/10.

I'm inclined to agree. If their wiki is true, they were just doing it out of rather pure interest with no financial backers whatsoever until later on. In fact it made it sound like other countries basically quit funding some other claimants listed in this thread because of how bad they turned out and assumed the brothers were scammers making fake claims. Until they showed up one day and flew circles in the air.

That pure drive of doing something out of sheer interest and refusal to accept failure is really inspirational. I wish I had half the drive they did!

The Wrights were motivated by money. They wanted to get rich off of licensing their technology.

They turned out to be fantastic engineers, but not so good at making money.

according to the U.S Park Service they got rich, but looked forward to being able to retire and devote themselves to scientific research again https://www.nps.gov/articles/wright-brothers.htm

They got rich after they stepped down from management.

They also did not attend university nor received high school diplomas. They were self driven a lot.

Look at their notebooks - they did the math!

We have no problem with drive and interest, but I wish we had half the funding of the scammers!

The 1903 Flyer did have one defect - it was unstable in pitch. It required an active hand on the pitch control.

I am forgiving of this defect for the reason that my attempts at aircraft in Kerbal Space Program have mostly had the same issues! There is a very, very small difference in design between an unstable plane and one with practically no pitch control at all, and the ideal configuration is found just between the two.

This is true again for the most advanced fighter aircraft, except the active hand is now a computer.

Rockets too

Can't do that in Kerbal Space Program (at least not without mods), but it works fine in meatspace

You can bend those materials at least once, the problem is bending them and still having the wings maintain their integrity through tens of thousands of flight hours.

The wings bend anyway. Watch 'em next time you fly.

The fuselage also twists and bends. This is why, in a long airliner, curtains are put in at intervals. This is because the twisting and bending is visible to the passengers in the back, and it unnerves them.

Not quite. The propeller and control surface configuration is now reversed from what was used on the original Flyer.

Oh, I'm convinced that if the Wrights had disappeared in a kiln explosion, the solution to powered, controlled flight would have been developed within another 5 years or so.

The canard design was the result of the Wrights being terrified of a stall like that which killed Lilienthal. And they were correct that the canard made for a quicker response to a stall. But it was also the source of pitch instability, and was eventually dropped.

Lilienthal died in 1896. The Wrights started the project by collecting every paper they could find on aeronautical engineering. The shortcomings of the existing research are evident in the fact that the Wrights still had to develop a series of prototypes, each designed to solve a particular aspect of flight. They put the solutions all together in the 1903 Flyer.

"...someone else in the world would have done it within 10 years." That is arguably true of every invention ever invented.

While I do agree this is the case for flight, I think saying EVERY major invention is not correct, or possibly not correct.

It's impossible to know how many people died shy of a breakthrough they were working on, that never was realised.

Who knows, maybe some materials genius choked on a pineapple two months before the breakthrough that could have given us transparent aluminium!

Sapphire is transparent aluminum. Already used in semiconductors and consumer goods.

It is, and being aware of that is crucial in having the right perspective on inventors (and same is true about scientific discoveries). That is, they're not some superhuman geniuses so far ahead the rest of humanity, that through sheer power of their minds, they can wrestle breakthroughs from the hands of gods. No, they're just specialists who were at the right time and place, and had the right experience, to be the first to pluck an invention that was already ripe for the taking.

This isn't to diminish the value of inventors. Even as all discoveries are tiny increments on top of prior work, so tiny they quickly become apparent to many people in a given field, it still takes exceptional skills, knowledge and smarts to be the first (or one of the firsts) to make that increment. That is worthy of respect. But at the same time, inventors are not critical to inventions - if not for the inventor we know, someone else would've done the same within months or years.

> an invention that was already ripe for the taking.

Powered, controlled flight was clearly not ripe for the taking at the time the Wrights embarked on solving it. See the list of their accomplisments I posted. They had to get all of them right to solve the problem. Which is another reason why I'm not buying what the pretender defenders contend.

To expand on that a bit, the Wrights clearly needed to solve multiple basic problems in order to produce a working airplane. To do this, they first identified the problems, then conducted a directed research and development program to solve them, one by one. Having solved them, they combined the results into a working airplane.

Nobody else was doing that at the time.

Without the Wrights, individual inventors might each solve one of the problems independently, and then a later individual puts it together.

The Wright approach was itself fundamentally innovative.

> being aware of that is crucial in having the right perspective on inventors.

Can you go a step further on why the right perspective here is important?

Feels like you’re telling a kid Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why kill the magic?

> Feels like you’re telling a kid Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why kill the magic?

Because lying to your kids will only cost you their trust, however letting adults believe in magic leads to them making bad decisions with tragic consequences to themselves, their families, communities and countries.

Not to mention that clarifying this can lead to increased motivation to learn and discover stuff, as kids won’t think that if they are not geniuses they shouldn’t even try to create something new.

Agreed. It is a flaw of the media and human psychology that we shine the spotlight disproportionately. The media is almost always a caricature of reality. Scientific journals provide a more realistic view of innovation as an incremental process without as much hype.

> 4. First design that used a wind tunnel to get an efficient wing shape

The Wrights based their wing on Lilienthal's who used a variant of a wind tunnel (as well as actual gliders) for optimizations.

You could also argue he ran a coherent research program too, just it was sadly stopped by his fatal flying accident.

https://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/ewright.htm

Lilienthal's lift/drag numbers turned out to be off by a factor of 2, which is why the Wrights developed their wind tunnel and did exacting experiments to get the correct numbers, and developed the shape of their wing from it.

If you read Anderson "A history of Aerodynamics" it disagrees on this point. It states that the Wright's didn't have a good way to calculate drag, and they didn't understand many of the side effects from real wings (like flow separation) which caused wrong measurements initially. Later on they apparently came back to something that was closer to Lilienthal's numbers, even though the problem simply wasn't fully understood at the time.

This paper has a similar conclusion: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...

"When the Wright brothers compared their results with those of Lilienthal, they found some disagreement, but not as much as they expected. As Wilbur states in his diary for October 16, 1901: "It would appear that Lilienthal is very much nearer the truth then we have heretofore been disposed to think." [Wolko, 21]. 17 The formulas were still not producing the lift and drag that were actually being produced. The only other possible source of error in these equations was the Smeaton coefficient of air pressure."

Thanks for the information. The bottom line was the Wrights needed a considerably bigger wing than that predicted by Lilienthal's numbers.

A great list although the phrase cherry-picking comes to mind. Should we add 8. "Wright biplane used ground mounted launching rails, and assistance of a catapult".

New Zealand has its own contentious "powered flight" claimant Richard Pearse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

Self-promotion and patriotism often are the biggest influence on what the narrative becomes (e.g. Edison, space race).

1. The 1903 Flyer did not use a catapult. It did use a single rail, as taking off from sand is not very practical.

2. There's a lot of question about Pearse's first flight, as to its date and whether it happened at all - because Pearse left behind no photos, drawings, documentation, or the airplane.

3. Edison's claims are fully documented, witnessed, patented, and litigated.

Echoing my other comment on patents elsewhere in the thread, Edison's innovations had big, direct and lasting impact on the world. For example, his work is responsible for creating Hollywood as a place and symbol of US film industry - specifically because he owned most of the patents critical for movie production, and was so litigious that the filmmakers decided to all literally move to the other side of the continent to be able to infringe on those patents without consequences.

Edison gets credit for inventing the inventing business.

The Wrights get credit for the first directed research and development project. (The Apollo project took that to an extreme!)

Surely steam engines or other Industrial Revolution inventions should take credit for first directed research and development projects?

Those inventions were incremental progress by individual inventors. Not a directed research and development project.

If you know of one that existed prior to the Wright, I'd like to hear about it.

The Apollo program is a stellar(!) example of a directed research and development project. They started with a goal, identified the problems, solved each problem in an organized manner, and put the solutions together and accomplished the goal.

No idea if this is trustworthy but a documentary on Westinghouse claimed that Edison took credit for all of his employee's inventions. Westinghouse did not.

https://youtu.be/wuqodfC9WwY?t=3790

Pearse certainly did not document his experiments well. But there were multiple witnesses. It appears that he achieved flight on 31th March 1903. The Wright brother's contributions to flight were obviously more significant due to their process but that alone does not mean that they were first.

There are lots of witnesses to bigfoot, too.

It took several years of concerted effort for the Wrights to achieve flight. Is it possible that someone tinkering in a barn could design and build one in one go? Engine, wings, propellor, flight controls, all correctly put together? Where are the remains of his machine? His notebooks?

It's possible that Pearson did it, but highly unlikely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I've invented things that I never documented. Other people invented them later, documented it, and got the credit. That's how it works.

Close. The 1901 glider used a rail and took off down hill. Their Flyer used skids and could take off from level ground even on sand.

The skids were for landing. I don't recall them ever taking off using the skids.

> 2. First propellor theory that was twice the efficiency of other airscrews

> 3. First aircraft engine that had twice the power/weight of other engines

The other points seem good but I’m a little skeptical of these—“the first 2x improvement” generally seems like a less impressive metric in the sense that when a field is early and thing are just getting started, large-multiplier improvements are pretty common, right? The first 2x improvement to engine power/weight in an airplane could just be the result of being the first ones to seriously look at the problem.

As a field matures, the multipliers might get much smaller as the low hanging fruit is picked out. The last 2x improvement might be more impressive actually.

The Wrights looked into marine screws, and were astonished to discover they were all designed by trial and error.

The Wrights made a breakthrough in realizing that a propellor was a rotating wing, and developed the first theory of propellors enabling them to build one that was 90% efficient. This is as opposed to the flat bladed screws used by other experimenters which were 50% efficient.

This means a near doubling of power for the same weight of engine and drive train.

The Wrights could not find an existing engine with the desired power/weight, and the engine makers refused to design/build one. Hence they hired a machinist to help design/build a custom engine, with double the power/weight ration of existing engines. The Wrights developed the very first practical aviation gas engine.

This was an enormous factor in creating a successful airplane.

P.S. Fun fact: Santos Dumont was a rather tiny man. In the movie "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" they created several flying replicas of early machines, including Dumont's "Demoiselle". But the Demoiselle wouldn't fly, it just ran around the field nailed to the ground. Finally, the engineers realized that Dumont was a tiny man, and located a tiny pilot, and then the Demoiselle flew delightfully. So, Dumont had his own peculiar advantage in power/weight.

Santos Dumont was 5'4", which althogh small, not out of the real of "normal" I don't think. Jules Verne was one inch taller. He was fairly skinny too, so the weight could have been a factor. I did find a video of it, fun to see as the Demoiselle is my favorite early flyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNWPpKEZzxg

The weight was definitely a factor.

"being the first ones to seriously look at the problem" is what makes the Wright Brothers so historically significant. They tackled flight as an engineering problem and put serious work into a lot of the important sub-problems. Their superior methodology is a big part of what led to their overall success and being first to achieve other less arbitrary milestones.

To be fair, #6 and I think #7 were true of Santos Dumont as well, and for years after 01903 (which did have witnesses, who were disbelieved, but AFAIK no public photos) the Wrights were very secretive. Santos Dumont himself favored crediting the Wrights, since he had achieved sustained flight but not controllable sustained flight.

I don't think 6 and 7 were done by Dumont before 1903. Insufficient documentary information is available, like a detailed description of the design.

While airplanes are catapulted from carriers due to the limited runway length available onboard, it's worth noting that they are fully capable of taking off from standard runways. On the other hand, a glider can only be launched using a catapult or by gliding off a cliff.

The Wright brothers did create a glider ( https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/1900-wright-gl... ). They also created a powered airplane a gasoline engine and propellers ( https://www.nps.gov/articles/wrightflyer.htm ). They also continued to develop their planes after that first flight. I'm amused by the number of people I've met who seem to think that they flew around a little, then stuck everything in the barn and went back to bicycle making.

These days, gliders/sailplanes are commonly launched using winches or tow planes.

Motor gliders self-launch.

When you catapult a plane that can't fly, it still can't fly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langley_Aerodrome#/media/File:...

The Wright flyer could and frequently did do circles around the field for several minutes after being catapulted. It was no glider.

Or into an intense headwind.

None of this seems to be evidence that the Wrights were first. But I won’t be so cynical to suggest the list is the kind of things that make second systems second systems.

The Wrights are giants in the history of aviation for reasons like those you describe whether or not they were first.

From the perspective of their patents and the multi-year monopoly that they exploited with everything from aircraft sales to the military to flying schools being first is certainly critical.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been taught the Wrights were first all my life. But I live in the US.

The Wrights demonstrated what was needed to fly, and there's no evidence the pretenders had solved those problems.

For example, they had flat propellors without an airfoil. This means they needed nearly twice the power. Their engines would have been twice as heavy, too. They didn't have useful flight controls. Their wings looked smaller than the Flyer's.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The Wrights had every bit of evidence needed. None of the others did.

I had never thought to critically consider the story of the Wright brothers until reading your earlier comment and thinking “that’s not evidence they were first.”

Sure I had been aware that patents and monopolies were involved in part from reading a book about their flying school[1] when I lived in Alabama. But I didn’t connect the follow the money importance of being first until earlier today.

And now I have gone down a bit of rabbit hole.

To me, it is clear why Santos=Dumont is worth celebrating in Brazil. Because he was the first person to fly in front of a body of independent experts, we don’t have to accept claims that align with self interest and local newspapers. It seems that the Wright brothers did not fly in public until well after Santos-Dumont had.

What really fascinates me is not who was first, but the way in which I always experienced the Wright brothers story. When I read about their flying school, it seemed odd that the planes at the school were “so old fashioned” compared to those of Europe in the 1910’s…and at the larger scale how the Wright brothers story conventionally stops in 1903.

So thanks.

[1] https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/wright-brothers-fl...

> It seems that the Wright brothers did not fly in public until well after Santos-Dumont had.

That's correct. The Wrights were secretive because they wanted to ensure they had the patents locked up before disclosure. But they were smart about ensuring there was a solid trail of evidence of thier invention.

Santos Dumont did not have 3-axis controls, though. Neither did the European airplanes that were developed. At one point, the Wrights crated their flyer and went to Europe to demonstrate it. The European airplanes were very difficult to turn (because there were no roll controls). The Wrights just blew them all away by flying in tight, controlled graceful circles.

The Europeans immediately redesigned their machines to incorporate roll control.

I would like to nominate this comment as one of the best ever posted on HN. In fact, I would love to see a whole documentary about each of these points.

See "The Wright Brothers as Engineers" by Quentin Wald

https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-Engineers-Appraisal-E...

You can actually formally do just that, HN maintains a highlights list which you can email them nominations for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

Thanks, I didn't know about that previously, although some sorting methods might be nice. It seems like quite a lot of comments are getting nominated that seem pretty...normal.

Check out Gregs Airplanes and Automobiles for really well researched aeronautic docs. He made one specifically about the Wrights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpQAGQiv4Q

Humans sometimes write punchy lists, too, especially when they're trying to prove a point. Where do you think the LLMs learned it?

Stylometry has me pegged with a predictable style that predates AI.

Writing that predates AI is precisely the type of writing AI mimics. :)

Distinguished computer scientist [EDIT: engineer!], seasoned writer, and longtime HN stalwart @WalterBright? Frankly I’d be willing to imagine the AI learned what it knows from him…

Thanks for the kind words! But I can't claim to be a computer scientist, as I have not done any research. Engineering is my calling, not science.

I've made similar postings on HN about the Wrights years before AI.

As noted, I did not think your comment was AI-generated.

> It seems to have mostly turned back to "if it's useful, it's okay"

No. Everyone still hates them with passion--at least when the commenter mentions that it is LLM generated.

Walter Bright is not an AI...

Walter Bright was replaced by a D9000 AI chatbot several years ago. He was jeopardizing the mission.

As with many inventions, the Wright brothers weren't the first inventors of the airplane but the last ones. Everyone else built off them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Taylor_(mechanic) needs to get more credit for designing and building the engine in the Wright Flyer.

Nobody thinks of folks like the guy holding the camera, or the sherpas, or...

I always felt bad for Buzz Aldrin. He landed on the moon at the same moment Armstrong did. But Armstrong was "first".

Don't feel bad. It is better to be the second person on the moon then to never land on the moon. And it's better to orbit the moon than to never leave the Earth.

I now think of myself as being the lucky one who gets to be at the right place and the right time, experiencing the act of creation is a gift from everything and everyone else that helped make it possible.

They were also the first ones to truly understand the relationship between pitch, roll & yaw.

>> If you look at other contenders, they were all lacking these points.

I'm not saying you're wrong but that's not really proving your point.

Santos-Dumont flew in public for an assembled group of experts. The Wright’s did not.

There is no sense in which he was a pretender. He had been “open source” flying for years.

This article says it better than I can:

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_...

Not mentioned, though, is Dumont could not turn his airplane. The Wrights could, from the first one.

What's also interesting is the story after 1903. The big aircraft builder today isn't the Wright Company, it's Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Wright brothers got embroiled in patent lawsuits (in particular against Curtiss), instead of continuing their developments. They eventually won, but Wilbur died in 1912 (possibly related to all the traveling done as part of the patent fights).

Actually, initially they even fought to have people believe in their success. They weren't that great at public relations, and it took a while for people to believe they had a working airplane.

There was also a feud with the Smithsonian. Until the forties, the Smithsonian considered a competing aircraft to be the first airplane (also related to Curtiss). In 1948 the Wright estate sold the first plane to the Smithsonian for a dollar, but the agreement stipulated that

"Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the 1903 Wright Aeroplane, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."

I guess this partially explains why the Americans only know about the Wright brothers as the original inventors of the airplane, as opposed to various national heroes in other countries.

Oh an btw, talking about companies. The company the Wright brothers founded still exists - it's now Curtiss-Wright, I guess Wright eventually merged with their worst enemy (and a bunch of other companies).

Too bad the Wright brothers didn't continue their developments as successfully as they started, and struggled to make it big on top of their invention. At least they got the recognition eventually.

Btw, the Smithsonian has a cool exhibit on the Wright brothers, really encourages to you read up on them. [1]

[1] e.g. here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers)

Wilbur tied of typhoid contracted from bad food.

If you postfacto cherry pick the criteria by which to credit the inventor of a plane then yes, the wright brother unequivocally invented the plane.

It's not hard to pick out the factors that enabled their success. Multiple breakthroughs were needed. What is hard is to find convincing proof that anyone beat them to it.

The Wrights were successful and influential, yes.

But they were not the first. Unless you cherry pick criteria to disqualify everyone else.

Which is what you’re doing.

The amount of documentation provided by the Wrights makes denial of their claim to being the first tauntamout to Moon landing denialism. Even several years later and with the benifit of knowing of the Wright's innovations, Santos-Dumont was barely able to get off the ground for a few hundred meters while the Wrights were flying tens of kilometers.

But that's the point -- it's all about the definition of what constitutes the first airplane, which is kind of arbitrary.

If you get off the ground for a few hundred meters, why isn't that enough to be first?

Why does it need to be tens of kilometers? Are you establishing a 1km distance minimum? Based on what?

I'm not taking any position either way. But the idea that it's "Moon landing denialism" is ludicrous. It's not about whether the Wright brothers flew. It's about how you draw the definition of "flying" as opposed to e.g. an "assisted jump", which is non-obvious.

The Wrights' achievement is powered, controlled flight.

You're helping my point.

Define powered. Powered enough to take off from a flat surface without wind? Could the Flyer III do that? Or are you allowed to have wind behind you? If so, how much? Surely not 50 knots? Where's the line?

Define controlled. Look at how much Flyer I and Flyer II crashed. Are they controlled? How controlled is controlled? Where's the line?

I'm not saying who invented the plane. I'm saying reasonable people will come up with different reasonable definitions. Different totally justifiable lines. And it's not "denialism" to appreciate that reality.

>> All modern aircraft can trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, and no other claimant.

All heavier-than-air powered aircraft. Balloons and unmanned gliders have a different history, them having existing long before the 1900s.

The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless, because the largest part of the invention is collective. Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors.

Without the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont, aviation might have been created a few years later, but, overall, the consequence would have been small.

It's a big deficiency in the way history is taught, at least here in the US, it's mostly taught as Guy/Group X did Y in year ZZZZ and leaves out a lot of the context that shows how many people were often doing similar things before or simultaneously. It leads a lot of people to buy into the Great Man of History view point when there's rarely singular figures that the the principal cause, often they're just the one who won.

We had a history teacher in high school who noted that. He always tried to cover the factors that led up to an event happening. I always appreciated that.

Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".

My history teacher in middle school really liked to tell us the idea of "historical determinism" whenever an individual appeared to have changed the course of history. Of course that theory doesn't place enough emphasis on individual effort or even their free will. But I guess I appreciated the alternate viewpoint.

I have this complaint about a lot of more modern history, which is that the idea of the great man theory is so abhorrent that some historians have started to treat the concept of free will as non-existent where the forces of history are so powerful things were all but inevitable. People are driven by economic, environmental, and societal factors. But sometimes there is an individual that makes things move one way or another.

I usually like to take the example of WWI, it was probably going to happen regardless in Europe eventually. But King Wilhelm II was an individual that has specific psychological aspects that drove it to happen the way it did. A different king would not have created the alliance situation that made the specific powers fight on their specific side. If King Wilhelm didn't try and emulate and thus alienate England, we might have seen England and Germany against Russia and France.

It is a bit funny when some historians describe "great man theory" as blatantly false, while warning that specific individuals are uniquely dangerous when commenting on ongoing politics.

If "great man theory" is 100% false and each person is 100% replaceable with no change for historical events, why complain so much that $POLITICIAN is uniquely dangerous?

(my opinion is that both individuals and trends matter, there are people that changed history, but power of geography/economy/technology is also great - for example, once nuclear weapons were discovered it had some consequences. And no individual can uninvent nuclear weapons.)

$POLITICIAN is just the visible face of a much larger movement, specially in democracy. But by being the public face,it also means that defeating $POLITICIAN is defeating his backing movement by proxy.

Extreme version of "great man theory" denialism claims that it does not matter even who wins elections or rules.

One man dictators like Mao, Stalin or Hitler have huge impacts on history depending on their personal idiosyncrasies. Had any of those three died young, history would have been substantially different.

Wars can also be decided my random misfortunes. If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.

At the same time the environment of the times and place (encompassing the political sphere here as well) they rose to power also tends to select particular types of people to rule. I'm not a pure structuralist for sure, there's a lot of room for randomness and individual quirks in history for sure I think structure is a lot more powerful in science/tech since you can generally have a lot more people working away at a scientific problem than you can have running France for example. It's also waaay harder to study because you don't get the counterfactual of who would wind ruling post WW2 USSR if not Stalin.

> If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.

That's actually less true than it might seem. Warmer winters can be worse for highly mechanized armies like the Wehrmacht, really any army but tanks and mud are not friends. That part of the world especially in the early 40s where many of the roads were unpaved turns into a giant sucking mud pit during warmer winters. It's bad enough it's bogged down modern armies miles south in Ukraine when the weather warms up from the winter freezes and the mud season sets in. On top of that they needed a lightning victory because their fuel situation was already pretty bad in 41, part of the reason for going East in the first place was to get oil for the war machine.

The fact that the particular example is technically untrue doesn't change the overall point though.

A slight change in weather and England could have been invaded by the Spanish Armada.

I'm not saying it does, just thought it was an interesting aside to talk about, Barbarossa was pretty flawed from the very beginning.

Also I don't think it's a great pro-Great Man nor anti-Structuralist argument. Structuralist don't believe it's deterministic generally and if history is so down to random chance then how important are the "Great Men"? It's basically a wash for either side imo.

By "mild" I meant more that it's not so cold that tank engines can't start and tons of German soldiers freeze to death. Not that it matters for the bigger point.

FWIW, I asked Grok and it said that with better weather Germany might have taken Moscow, but they were probably (80%) doomed anyway because of several factors, including Hitler's incompetent military strategy.

If they had attacked in April instead, Grok gives it 50% chance that they defeat the Soviets before the winter and Lend-Lease equipment makes it hopeless.

I know, it's just a word predicting piece of mindless software...

Still, I stick by my main point. The Spanish Armada example is better than mine.

Why is great man theory “abhorrent”?

Part of it might be calling the most violent and murderous people in history "great".

I really hate this take because it implicitly ignores the baseline murderous-ness of the systems and situations these leaders inherit. Nelson Mandela wasn't gonna rise to the top of the pile in 1920s Russia.

Furthermore, the people who underpin various states and societies (and the cultures and movements that shape them) do ultimately choose who rules them. Leaders only have freedom of action within the window of what their political capitol affords them. The people, or even just the ones that call the shots (this should be a familiar concept if you've ever seen a TV show centered around a medieval royal family) very much do set that window. Grant and Eisenhower's "failure" to thoroughly exploit conquered territory would have made them unsuitable for further leadership in antiquity for that matter yet they were both more or less instantly elevated by the existing power structure and elected to the highest office.

Marx particularly (ironically?) hated it.

Incidentally I remember my history teacher commenting that even if Marx didn't exist at that time, communism would still be born around that time in history.

The ground was definitely ripe for Communism/Socialism, you see some glimmers of it in things decades before in the French Revolution.

Marx himself would say so. Key to Marxism is studying history to come up with a scientific theory which predicts the future course of society. If individuals can change the course of history through shear force of their will, bending society in unpredictable ways to suit their individual fancy, that throws a wrench into it.

But can anybody seriously say that if not for Napoleon, there surely would have been some other French general, inspired by Julius Caesar to conquer everything he could, who was simultaneously also a master tactician with enough skill to get as far as Napoleon did? I can buy the premise that somebody else in that political environment might have tried, but to get so far and embroil most of the world in war as Napoleon did wasn't a deterministic predictable consequence of the circumstance. You can probably predict a civil war, but not the Napoleonic Wars.

There's definitely problems with a 100% structuralist view of history too make no mistake. Things like politics, battles and wars are more prone to the effects of outliers and random chance just by their nature, you can't have 1000 people try to conquer Italy with one of the least loved chunks of the French Army at the same time, unlike how you can have 1000 people working on radio or flight at a time. On the other side of the coin without the French Revolution which he had no part in creating or driving he would have likely stayed a minor artillery officer or less in the Acien regime.

Wilhelm II, as despicable as he was, really can't be majorly blamed for WWI. His ministers had arranged for him to be on vacation during the July crisis because they knew he wouldn't be tough enough, and when Serbia responded to the Austrian ultimatum, Wilhelm was convinced that this should be enough to avert a war.

I am not really referring to wilhelmn II in world war I itself but rather the 20 or so proceding years where his pursuit of naval and colonial supremacy alienated Germany from the British and French, undoing Bismark’s alliance system. WWI I think was almost inevitable.

WWI seems like more of a slow motion train wreck than WWII does. There were so many pieces in motion even if Archduke Ferdinand's assassination (which came very close to not happening) precipitated it. Whereas while the aftermath of WWI planted the seeds for WWII, it seems a lot less inevitable.

Total side-note, I've actually seen Serbia's basic FU response to Austro-Hungary in Serbia :-)

WW2 is also is what defined the lines of the modern geopolitical world so everyone brought up in that world has been fed a lifetime of establishment media that portrays ww2 as inevitable.

It's kind of like how every religious founding document has a huge element of "and the sinners/bad people were struck down as they inevitably would be because they did not live by god/he was not on their side" when when describing the origin of whoever is god's chosen people according to that religion.

You just lay down a foundation and keep putting layers on top of that…

I think there's a wide variety of ways this gets taught (in the US at least).

But if you go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where the Wright Flyer is currently on display, maybe a third of the room's displays document the achievements of the wide array of pioneers of flight besides the Wright Brothers, followed by maybe another third of the room documenting the fast followers who competed with the Wright Brothers (and many of their tragic deaths).

It's not impossible to find of course, it's not like it's being suppressed, but if you just go through high school, and a lot of colleges depending on their general education requirements, your main history education will be very Great Person oriented.

To discount individual achievement is such a disservice to humanity. There is absolutely an environmental benefit but i take issue with the totally BS if they didn't do it someone else would on all things is such a knee cap to individual merit and ability.

Merit and ability sit atop of the works of all humanity but without it nothing would be accomplished.

It's not about wiping out individual achievements it's just about recognizing that no one does it alone and that some ideas were just ready to explode. Radio, Calculus, the Steam Engine, etc all had simultaneous inventions in many areas or get commonly attributed to one particular person are actually just built up to a point they can be successful through the work of dozens of people.

I'm also not saying it's 100% structural or economic just the education tends to highlight individuals instead of fully covering all the others that were just behind the person who's getting the lion's share of the credit historically.

You're arguing against an imaginary position, no one is really arguing that people don't and didn't have to work for the things they managed to do just that there are structural and historical forces that made what they do possible and in many cases others were right on their heels (or actually succeeded first but didn't commercialize or document their successes).

I'd be very surprised if it were unique to the US although there's probably some cultural element. There is a tendency to ascribe invention to an individual even if the real answer is an individual's lab/team or really a more complex story. E.g. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine although he came up with an innovation that made it significantly more efficient. Look at almost any significant invention and its history is... complicated. But ask who invented something and "complicated" isn't a very satisfactory answer.

Fits the whole pull yourself up by the bootstraps mindset. I can imagine income inequality would be less disparate if people realized how much society actually contributes.

FWIW when I was an aerospace major, one of the first lessons in “fundamentals of flight” as the class was named, was about the race to flight that was heating up around the time of the Wright brothers. But this was in an aerospace class, so I guess it’s less relevant. Never heard about the Brazilian guys though

Interesting, given Dumont performed "the first officially observed flight in Europe that was longer than 25m was performed in Paris (FRA)" in 1906.

It was also the first flight in front of a crowd, so pretty relevant to history.

Sources: https://old.fai.org/news/personalities/42650-12-november-190...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/10-milesto...

In 1906, Santos-Dumont flew 220 meters for less than half a minute. In 1905, Wilbur Wright flew 38.9 km for more than 39 minutes.

This isn't one of those cases, like light bulbs, where it can be reasonably debated who was first. The Wrights were in front of the competition by literal miles.

Not sure why you feel the need to point that out when I just listed some relevant facts about why Dumont was relevant to aviation history.

Also is a deficiency in patents. Instead of giving a temporary monopoly on a genuine original idea and solution, it becomes a land rush to who can get to a newly obvious idea the fastest.

That's not how I remember learning it in grade school. There was a whole chapter on people trying and failing to achieve flight and many close calls. Then there was yet more history about other groups who achieved it after the Wright Bros.

I agree that simultaneous invention is an important concept, but I view it separately from Great Man Theory of History. GMTH is invariably trying to capture the idea that when you have a person who has a lot power, then their successes or failures can have a large impact on the rest of society. I don't dispute that they can be part of the zeitgeist of forces that are driving society, but sometimes what one person in power says matters a lot. I think it probably matters less for scientific pursuits where a lot of people are thinking about something and one person happens to be the person who got there first (not that this doesn't deserve praise either).

Absolutely.

This applies to "negative" inventions, too: Eugenics was a pretty favorably and openly discussed concept in the early 1900s (e.g. Winston Churchill was a pretty vocal proponent), but Hitler basically gets all the credit for the whole idea.

A lot of the world was hot for eugenics at the time the US in particular, a lot of the pre-Final Solution laws were systematizing things that were happening in the US on an basis ranging from ad-hoc to legal; sterilization of people with mental issues, miscegenation laws, etc.

:D thanks, you made me laugh.

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour-extras...

I mean, I'm pretty sure Eugenics was invented by Eugene, thus the name. Or it was a way to avoid needing to know people's names, because everyone would be named Eugene. :P

Thank goodness it's not "Eugene Torvalds" who made a kernel just for fun!

> at least here in the US

I didn't realize that you spoke for everyone. Maybe you were taught that info by your instructor, but that doesn't mean everyone followed a similar format.

They never said literally everyone. It's undeniably the rule but that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions.

> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless,

I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative.

Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together.

Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together.

Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected.

I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.

Who created the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer? And why does everyone think it's an American, 4 years later?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

History is not a collection of objective records.

Even that Wikipedia page has this snippet:

  In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse, however, did not know of Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[11]: 149  for his first computer Z1, which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938.

Because every computer record has a host of qualifiers on it (like "programmable", "fully automatic").

"The Z3 was demonstrated in 1998 to be, in principle, Turing-complete. However, because it lacked conditional branching, the Z3 only meets this definition by speculatively computing all possible outcomes of a calculation."

this is the one factor that makes me question whether it should be considered first.. conditional branching is pretty significant to what we consider a computer. better informed people than myself have come up with a variety of takes on this, i read all that i see because i find Zuse fascinating but i still am not sure if its fair to call one system or the other "first".

the advent of computing podcast has some interesting well researched episodes, scroll down a little to 145 and 146: https://adventofcomputing.com/

I believe that invention was a bit controversial, for some reason...

A lot of modern Germans seem to be very proud of it for some reason. Also Zuse's company existed long after the WWII.

I saw the replica of this in Berlin in the museum of technology a few months ago. Worth visiting if you are in town.

I guess that’s why the saying is that “history is written by the victors”.

This was a surprising one for me:

During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries:

- *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*: Both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton formulated his version in the 1660s but didn't publish it immediately. Leibniz began his work on calculus in the 1670s and published his findings in the late 17th century. This led to a prolonged dispute over who first invented calculus.

- *Robert Hooke*: Hooke proposed ideas about planetary motion and gravitation. In the 1670s, he suggested that planets are attracted to the Sun by a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This concept influenced Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation, though the two scientists had intense arguments over the credit for this discovery.

- *James Gregory*: A Scottish mathematician, Gregory made significant contributions to calculus and series expansions. He discovered the series expansion for the inverse tangent function, known as Gregory's series, and worked on methods of calculating areas under curves, which are fundamental aspects of calculus.

These instances highlight the phenomenon of multiple discovery, where different scientists independently arrive at similar conclusions around the same time.

The show “Connections” with James Burke does a wonderful job of highlighting these sorts of overlapping of ideas and people and their collective results. Old, but well worth a watch!

https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978

We still mostly use Leibniz' dy/dx notation. Newton's fluxions and y-dot (a dot over the y) notation are largely forgotten.

The Hooke debate gave us a great quote from Newton. "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Hooke was a dwarf...)

~20 years ago in school, I encountered dy/dx and y-dot with about equal frequency (and maybe y' & f'(x)) in engineering and calculus courses. Engineering favored the dots.

I went though most of a pure math degree along side my CS degree and I don't think I ever saw ẏ used, mathematics as far as I know basically completely adopted the Leibniz notation.

I got most of the way to a PhD and only saw y-dot in one differential equations course.

Same here, and also agree with the "prime" notation, i.e., y'! One of my instructors had joked that the dot/prime notations saved printing costs in the days when printing was expensive - not sure if there is any truth to that.

At least Leibniz is still famous for the biscuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz-Keks

The fig Newton was invented first though.

Seriously though, it’s a bit of an amusing coincidence that the Leibniz biscuit and the fig Newton were both independently invented in 1891 (at least according to Wikipedia).

Though only the Leibniz is named for the philosopher, the Newton is named for the town in Massachusetts.

I'm reading "The Secret Lives of Numbers" which has some fascinating deep dives into lesser taught math history (at least in western culture), including the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in India where significant contributions to calculus were made in the 1500's well before Newton and Leibniz!

Thanks ChatGPT.

When will people realize that pasting markdown is a dead giveaway?

Anybody who publishes on GitHub, Reddit, or Stack Overflow is pretty familiar with some variant of Markdown. People have been accidentally posting Markdown on HN much longer than there have been LLMs.

why would I write that myself when chatgpt can do it 10x faster?

I knew there were several people working on the same thing as Newton at the exact same time. I didn't know the exact dates and their names.

What would you do, Google it all? Good choice.

Why post at all if you don't want to write the comment yourself?

Because you want to share the info? I found it interesting and relevant to the discussion.

Why would you be a programmer at all if you're gonna let AI do the hard work?

Why even use a keyboard, that's for people that really don't know how to write themselves.

My favorite is that luggage with wheels was invented in 1972. The tech was there already. We just waited for somebody to invent it.

Mine is how we have evidence of wheels being used on children's toys in some south american cultures but not for transportation - they fully discovered everything to create wheeled transportation, but it's suspected that living on hilly terrain made it much less advantageous and it was not adopted.

Edit0: A good read : https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...

Edit1: from the source: "Rather, and as Hernandez said (1950: 40), the ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica did not apply the concept of revolving movement to transportation “simply because they did not want to, because of atavistic concepts worthy of being taken into account.” In a perceptive way, Hernández emphasized the indigenous ethos towards sacrifice and the offering of physical effort to the deities. Today, in Western thought, the constant technological innovation that leads to consumerism is valued, but in other cultures - ancient and modern - greater value is given to conservatism."

i guess the real invention for wheeled transportation is not wheels, but (flat) roads

You can’t scale up a wheel on a children’s toy and expect it to work on a loaded cart. It would just break. Cartwheels that will go the distance require fairly skilled carpentry.

Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans did have fairly skilled carpentry, though. They just didn't have cart wheels.

Perhaps it was precisely because they were not so skilled?

Carpentry is a pretty big field, so it is probably not right to say they were or weren’t skilled.

They didn’t have the specific skill of making cart wheels.

Plus draft animals capable of pulling large wagons.

Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian civilizations in the new world, and poor llamas cannot cut it.

Wheels are hugely beneficial for human-powered transportation too though, well, such as the luggage example up-thread.

It's thought the moyai on Easter Island were moved into place rolled on logs, they didn't have oxen or horses either, but rolling on logs or if they'd built a wheeled trailer make it much easier for a group of humans to move them without damage than just be dragging or rocking.

To be clear south american civilisations had the wheel and used it for throwing pottery, for drills and many other uses different than transportation - it is also suspected that they used the same log method to move large objects. Just not a wheel-axle-bearing "vehicle"

Coiling was actually the main method and there's not any evidence they used potters wheels until after European contact and even then it didn't take off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramics_of_Indigenous_peoples...

I don't think any American civilizations had the potter's wheel.

Over hilly terrain in jungle-y environments I bet that goes down a fair amount though, you have to make the simultaneous leap of wheeled carts plus road paving or maintenance to make the carts not a slog probably.

On cleared and mostly flat ground yes. But if you are going up any sorts of inclines human power doesn't really cut it over any real distances without adding mechanical assistance that slows everything way down. And on rough terrain its a wash even before you consider the difficulties in making wooden wheels that can survive off-road abuse for any length of time.

On the contrary, you'll apreciate wheels more if you are your own source of motive power.

It is certainly somewhat interesting that, unlike the Chinese, the Amerindians never used a wheelbarrow.

https://www.wheelbarrows.co.uk/evolution-of-the-wheelbarrow/

> Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian civilizations in the new world

Eventually. Horses only became extinct in the New World around 10,000 years ago — somewhere between 15,000 and 6,000 years after humans arrived.

Yes, the horse is actually an American species that expanded into the Old World.

The pre-Columbian civilizations (and by that I mean the highly organized socially stratified societies that we are aware of) only emerged several millennia after the paleo-Indians hunted horses to extinction, though.

They had giant sloths?

Well except they died out ~ 9,000+ years before the initial invention of the wheel.

Another potential reason it was never scaled up to carts is they didn't have access to a great draft animal candidate. Without that early carts are a lot less useful. The largest options were llamas or alpacas which are still fairly small and weak as draft animals go. The nearest option would have been buffalo in North America but they don't have great base temperaments for domesticating and they're not geographically relevant to South America even if they were.

Actually, this makes me think the opposite. This is a great example actually.

Polyurethane wheels weren't introduced to skateboarding until 1971. It took off in popularity due to this because the previous wheels were made of clay and were basically terrible.

I don't know the history of luggage wheels, but it sounds like it was waiting for the invention of the polyurethane wheel.

People credit Dick Fosbury for inventing the modern high jump approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop but it was the switch from jumping onto foam pads rather than into a pile of sawdust and sand that made it possible.

This. What held up wheeled luggage was the difficulty of having small, reliable wheels that could bear a lot of weight. You could have big wheels, but that would be impractical here, though not for chariots, wheelbarrows, pushcarts, or rickshaws ... which did exist in antiquity.

I remember metal skates (steel perhaps) in the early seventies.

I guess this kind of invention also depends on a few things outside what is technically possible:

Do you have enough flat surfaces where the wheels will work in the places people travel.

How cheap and dependable can you build it without adding too much weight to the luggage.

Are there enough people traveling and carrying their own luggage for them to purchase this.

More importantly, prior to airline deregulation in the 1970s only the wealthy and business travelers were flying and someone else carried their bags for them. It is the middle class traveler who lugs their own bags.

A bag on wheels is also practical in rail or boat travel, which wasn't exactly an abode of the rich.

Ever lugged a huge wheel-less piece of luggage around a big railway station? I have. It is hell.

I think the difference is that flight opened up quick trips where you might want a bag with just enough clothing for a few days. I also think the 1970s also hits a point where peoples' clothing had become a good bit simpler. Wheeled bags shine in airports for carry on bags.

Why wouldn’t quick trips work on surface transport? Sure, it takes a long time to go far - surely nearly nobody ever went from London to China and came back a week later until it was practical to do so on planes. But for short distances it still would have been practical. I’m guessing there were people going from London to Manchester for a few days well before the 1970s.

The railway companies in Britain built their own hotels. The first was in 1839:

> The first railway hotels in London were built at Euston. Two hotels designed by Hardwick opened in 1839 on either side of the Arch; the Victoria on the west had basic facilities while the Euston on the east was designed for first-class passengers

And in Manchester:

> The Grand Junction Railway, Britain's first trunk line, was completed between Curzon Street railway station in Birmingham and Warrington Bank Quay railway station, Warrington, on 4 July 1837. Through trains began to convey passengers from the station to Birmingham, and a separate booking office and waiting room were provided. From 17 September 1838 there were through carriages to London Euston by some trains after completion of the London and Birmingham Railway in that year. This increase in long-distance services resulted in one of the first private railway hotels opening in Liverpool Road.

Here it is: https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/tours/tour1/area1pa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_railway_station#Old_sta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Liverpool_Road_rail...

I think you also need travel to be available for a class of people who are both expected to change clothes every day and did not have porters carrying their luggage.

Air travel is basically immune to terrestrial obstacles. You can fly over almost anything, even though you do have to worry about the weather.

"I think the difference is that flight opened up quick trips where you might want a bag with just enough clothing for a few days."

Traveling salespeople etc. would often go on relatively short trips, even in the steam engine era. We underestimate mobility of pre-WWII people by a lot...

The point about simpler clothing is really interesting. I can imagine that this could be the crucial difference.

I think there are numerous small changes that all come together at the same time. It wouldn't have taken much to build wheels into steamer trunks.

My favourite is that humanity had fire, baskets, ropes and silk by 3500 BCE, but it took thousands of years before anyone combined them into a hot air balloon.

We could have been flying in the neolithic period.

Did it wait for someone to invent it, or for it to make economical sense to put this tech in that particular application?

You can’t little wheely luggage until it’s little wheely luggage time?

Nor if you have a class of low paid (and before that unpaid) people who carried luggage for travelers. There was a lot of social change in the US after the 1960's, and travel only became democratized recently.

You have this in India today, yet wheeled luggage has completely displaced unwheeled in any airport

Presumably that's because most of the people flying in or out are traveling from/to other countries, and it makes no sense for them to own one set of luggage for India, and another for the rest of the planet, especially if the latter is compatible with the former anyway.

Not on unpaved, bumpy roads.

I had a wheeled suitcase in probably the late 70s--which was an unstable wheeled traditional suitcase. (i.e. narrow configuration with a high center of gravity.)

Not sure why it took a while for manufacturers to reimagine to a more stable orientation.

There was some parallel technical innovation--such as the wheels and bearings for rollerblades--that was going on during the 80s.

Perhaps the need was less pressing when airports were smaller and fewer people traveled.

>Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors.

Correct. The electric bulb had at least 12 inventors and radio communication at lest 3 inventors.

I agree, which is why the Wright Brothers less "invented flight" than "had the first sustained engine-powered flight." A lot of historical documents describe it similarly to the latter, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

I think there's a loose threshold for when something is "viable," and that becomes the genesis of invention. Even in the Wright Brothers' case, the first flight was viable only in demonstration, there was no practical application for a few generations of aircraft.

And as this article highlights, US hegemony kind of ruled via the "winners write history" theory. Which is why some people still say Edison invented the light bulb.

Saying “who invented this?” is how the collective celebrates, strengthens and participates in its own tradition. In every field the neophyte meets illustrious predecessors who paved the way.

What made Wright Brothers the first, and not Santos Dumont or other people is that they not only created the first flying machine, they developed critical _PRINCIPALS_ of heavier then air flight that is used in every fixed wing aircraft since then.

Without Wright Brothers' innovations controlled flight is simply impossible.

Other people had things that looked similar to the Wright airplanes, but only the Wright airplane was able to take off, do figure 8s in the sky, and then land.

For example the rest of the world was operating off of aerodynamic mathematics of lift and drag that was simply incorrect. The Wright brothers built the air tunnels and created the math for better ones that actually worked.

The also figured out the principals to using rudders to counter adverse yaw in controlled flight. This is the tendency of the airplane to turn (yaw) against the direction of a turn.

And there are a few things beyond that. Without this controlled flight is not possible. Without figuring these things out airplanes are not really possible.

Now would of somebody else eventually figured it out?

Sure.

But it was the Wright brothers that did it first and that is the point. This is why they were able to create the first airplane and other people didn't. Even if they looked very similar it doesn't matter because they didn't incorporate the necessary features that made the Wright's plane work.

The Wright Brothers biography by David McCullough does a great job of covering the details here.

I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. And how the pieces come together can change the course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016 and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again.

So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down.

You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.

GP is talking about something else, and arguably in agreement with your view: for a technology to come about and stick, you need a perfect storm: all the pieces being available and a source of continued demand for it. The former you need for an invention to be made; the latter you need for it to survive - to continue being made and to spread worldwide.

WRT. rocketry, this is a story of technology getting almost, but not quite there - it was all evolving at a rapid pace, until suddenly demand disappeared. It's not that demand for rockets wasn't there at all - just not at the price point which designs from the 80s/90s commanded What Elon did with SpaceX, was to focus on dropping the price. That involved revisiting the reusable boosters idea, which didn't pan out then because they didn't have to worry about money as much. It got perfected and productized by SpaceX now, because it was a road to cheaper launches - and they got them cheap enough to meet the existing demand (and create more of it).

Also for rocketry the established players didn't want to majorly reduce the cost because they had government monopolies. Innovators dilemma.

I used to watch a show called Connections. Things can exist in other fields that cross over and make other fields absolutely ignite with interesting possibilities.

SpaceX is taking existing tech and rebuilding it up from ground up principles. It is the method they are applying to all of his businesses. Get something working. Then go back and throw everything out until it stops working. Then put that thing back. Then throw out more. The idea is if you still work perfectly fine without something you did not need it. Following the optimization method of 'the most optimal thing is the thing that is not there.' It is what took Tesla from a bespoke 1-5 cars per year company to the capability to build thousands per week. It is a brutal painful process that works.

The capability of building thousands of cars per week is quite old. You may be referring to EVs, but even in that category we have BYD that is knocking competitors out the park.

The idea you are specifying is called Muntzing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing - named after a CEO who supposedly made the poorest TVs on the market, but also the cheapest. Which left him with lots of money to spend on marketing those poor-quality TVs to people who they would not work for, who had to pay for their own return shipping.

It's increasingly debatable that the process actually does work.

The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire

Archimedes even demonstrated the principle of heated water caising a sphere to rotate

But there was little use for it, without substantial investment in other areas. Horses for land transportand human rowers for ships were just cheaper and more practical

It would take another 1500 years before Watt found its use for a pump

> The tech necessary for steam engines

They had basic concepts but could not have produced a steam engine that did useful work.

The Archimedes device you mention (the aeolipile) was basically a kettle mounted on an axle that did indeed spin. But it had no way of building up pressure to the degree necessary to move something other than itself.

The Romans probably didn't have good enough materials tech to build vessels that could hold sufficient pressure to do useful work. Early steam engines could explode catastrophically and they were built by cultures that had centuries of cannon-making experience behind them. The Romans also lacked a compelling application that would have driven tech development and didn't have the iron/steel/coal industry required to build railways, etc.

It's telling that the first commercially viable steam engines were basically water pumps for getting water out of mines, and it didn't matter if they were massive and underpowered. It took another 60/70 years for the tech to improve enough to power vehicles.

I also doubt the Romans had tools that could have machined a piston with sufficient precision either.

FWIW, there was plenty of use for pumps earlier on - in mining. But muscle power, then water power, was sufficient.

Part of the steam engine's success was how it contributed to itself - it helped mine coal that would fuel it, and that would fuel furnaces in which steel was made, some of that steel going into... making more engines - and all of that moved around by means of steam power.

*Factorio vibes intensify*

You had to have enough pieces together: demand for coal and steel and moving them distances, sustained long enough to exhaust simple options, and become a problem the steam engine could solve. It was then that the steam engine turned this into self-reinforcing loop, and kickstarted the modern world.

That exponential character is what we are seeing with computers too. Better computers increase both the supply and the demand for even more.

Your discussion with DrF jogged my memory a bit. There was a discussion on this topic some time ago (I'm fuzzy on when) that went into detail about how there needed to be a specific use case and demand for this. I'm trying to remember the blog, but a search on HN yielded this: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-...

I think this is the blog in question, and the most relevant part. If something else comes to me, I'll share it here.

The steam engine came about due to the spread of shipworms. Ships need copper shielding against that, thus mining deep, thus industrial revolution. First comes the demand.

Which came about by the merchant fleet of the British empire.

"The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire"

I read here on HN that this might be not really true. Because the romans did not heavily invest into high pressure chambers, aka cannons, like it was done in medival times. You don't just need a metal pot to build a steam engine. They must be able to hold much pressure and if they don't, they explode.

So the romans likely would have been able to make it work, but it would have required a significant investment - as they did not had experience in building pressure chambers.

> The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire

So long as you don't also add the "useful" qualification. If you want useful steam engines you things that didn't exist then. The iron alloys available to the Romans didn't allow for useful steam engines. Even the first steam engines were only useful in deep coal mines (where fuel was practically free) which the Romans didn't have.

Relevant: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

> The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire

IIRC I read somewhere it depended on the previous development of firearms, as it allowed metalworking to advance enough to produce metal tubes with very smooth and regular bores, that avoid leaks, jamming and uncontrolled explosions, to be fitted with pistons. The Roman empire had no firearms.

There were 100s of Newcomen engines throughout Europe which were mostly used to pump water. They were being deployed ~50 years before Watt improved the design.

I think we can say that a successful airplane was inevitable in the early 20th century because of the other work being done in the field at the time. Other designs were getting close, but didn't quite have the necessary combination of power to weight and lift to drag. The most important innovation from the Wrights was the realization that aerodynamic roll control was necessary; it's harder to say how many years would have been needed for someone else to try that.

That's not to say the same thing is true for any other invention or technological advance.

> Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together.

Perhaps invention is slightly different, but in the empirical sciences there's a bunch of stuff that occurred at roughly the same time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Science and technology are closely related, as the latter builds on the former, and so it is often the case that sometimes a little bit of luck / timing determines who is "first", e.g.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray

I think there is also a bifurcation to be had on inventions which take billions of dollars into a business to R&D and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per test vs inventions one mildly wealthy (or less) average individual can reasonably cover the investment of. The former is less about the invention making and more about the funding gathering.

> Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again.

Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.

IMO, even more important than funding is that NASA rockets are now designed by Congressional committee. It’s hard to innovate when you’re pressured into reusing Shuttle components to keep the money flowing to specific contractors.

We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of travel time instead of months, and much larger payload fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was revealed just how dangerous the they were.

It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it. Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible

It took another accident before anyone took the danger seriously enough to ground the Shuttle.

SpaceX has made a lot of real advancements while delivering real launches. You're thinking of Boeing.

There is a vast gulf of time between the 1970s and SpaceX. The space shuttle alone, fully NASA-run, was a (beautiful-looking) failure long before SpaceX came along. And it was fully government-designed and government-run. It was also astonishingly expensive.

Good things can happen in the private sector or the public sector. SpaceX is a good thing happening in the private sector. No one's brain has to go running to Republican-bashing and history compression to counterbalance that to avoid thinking new thoughts.

The space shuttle had government specified requirements (a single vehicle to do everything including capturing soviet satellites and ferrying people into orbit)

It had to do everything because the business case for it (that it would have sufficient ROI) required it. Even then, the business case was basically fraudulent, and the reality was even worse than the critics like Mondale were saying.

No engineer that works for SpaceX, with SpaceX, or is closely connected to engineers who work for SpaceX would agree with your assessment that SpaceX's success is due to:

> "break[ing] something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is."

It is possible that this will occur going forward now that Elon is a de facto government official, though. Also, the engineers in 1970s NASA are what created the Space Shuttle.

>Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.

Uh, SpaceX didn't come into being until 2002. And the Space Shuttle was not in any way cheap, nor a pile of things we did with it. Nor did the US Government in any way subsidize SpaceX, anymore then it "subsidizes" paper manufacturers by... ordering paper for its printers. It contracted with SpaceX for commercial services at a fixed price, and has saved billions and billions of dollars as a result. You seem a touch confused on timelines here.

And my entire point was that whatever could have been done, it wasn't. As I said, the government absolutely could have pursued other far fundamentally better concepts at the end of Apollo. Or it could have done commercial way earlier, getting out of the launch business entirely and working to switch over to a competitive private market 30-40 years earlier. What actually happened is that without the focus and level of discipline provided by a big ambitious goal and national spirit as a guiding star, more typical political incentives crept in and rapidly distorted the space program. Which resulted in enormous waste and stagnation as well as killing a lot of incredible people for no reason.

But regardless of how it happened, again the point is that it wasn't the scientific and tech environment that created a small window of a few years where inevitably practical economic mass launch designs would come about. It still took the right vision and right spark.

Technically NASA contracted with SpaceX (and several other companies as well, such as Boeing) to develop crew–rated versions of their rockets. That was explicitly a development contract where NASA paid a couple of billion up front to entice those companies to develop a crewed craft capable of visiting the ISS. Later they bought rides to and from the ISS from SpaceX and Boeing. SpaceX used that money and some of their own to go from the Falcon 1 to the Falcon 9. Since then NASA has bought flights on Falcon 9 rockets for launching satellites and space probes in addition to crewed flights to the ISS.

So yea, definitely a prudent investment. But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing. And even more billions wasted on SLS too.

>Technically NASA contracted with SpaceX (and several other companies as well, such as Boeing) to develop crew–rated versions of their rockets

No, the initial NASA contract was for cargo delivery via the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which dated to 2006. CRS and CC came significantly afterwards. Momentum did build but it was in fits and starts. It's a pretty fascinating bit of history in turns of twists and turns on both the political and technical sides, I highly recommend taking a look at the book Liftoff if you're at all curious. Like, even if it was selfish motivations it's worth noting that Commercial Crew probably would not have happened in 2010 without the support of Boeing itself.

>But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing.

Eh, I wouldn't fully agree with this sentiment honestly. The future we've arrived at was definitely not clear when the contracts were signed, and shit happens. If you're really serious about developing a new capability and place a few fully independent investment bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which would work and which wouldn't. That's just how it works. It's worth noting here too that Boeing has lost enormous amounts of money on its failures with Starliner. NASA has held them to the fixed price aspect of the contract. I suppose an argument could be made that NASA was more generous with milestone payments then they might have been, but at the same time that ultimately was Boeing shooting itself in the foot and NASA giving them rope because getting some money earlier didn't change the total pot at all. So if Boeing rushed, well that came back to bite them very hard.

>And even more billions wasted on SLS too.

That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.

> If you're really serious about developing a new capability and place a few fully independent investment bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which would work and which wouldn't.

Sure, that’s true. But my point is that those initial investments were a subsidy. They weren’t buying a product that already existed, they were paying someone to develop a product so that they could buy the product once it existed. It definitely paid off, even counting the money spent on Starliner.

> That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.

Agreed. I am just saying that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. At this point we’d be better off cancelling SLS and doing our next moon mission by launching smaller craft into Earth orbit on Falcon Heavy and docking them together. Like Apollo but with several launches spread out over a week instead of a single giant rocket. We could even assemble a cycler that way.

> we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA

Sure we do, just watch For All Mankind :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)

A more interesting question is what could have happened if NASA had used much more of its funding on practical research (including rocketry research), instead of wasting a huge amount of it on sending people up into space for no good reason over the past 50 years.

Currently, almost half of NASAs budget is spent on manned space flight.

> Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993.

Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?

>Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?

Orbital is what actually provides any significant economic value. But the nature of the Rocket Equation, effects with atmosphere, and how those interact with the limits of our material science means that there is an absolutely enormous gulf between a sounding rocket and getting to orbital velocity and back again. All of that is what makes it so hard but it's also required to be of any real practical use. So the DC-X was a noteworthy historical milestone/demo and test bed but going from there to something like the Falcon 9 let alone Starship takes an tremendous amount of further innovation and engineering (and investment of course). The new engine work alone SpaceX has done is a hufe deal and is what defines the envelope for the rest of the system.

An orbital craft is moving at hypersonic speeds, which is a especially tricky when going backwards. Things moving through fluids tend to want to flip over so that the part with the highest drag is at the rear, so that drag is minimized. Meanwhile the engine bay of a rocket is not generally shaped to have low drag when pushing through the air.

Wouldn't any spacecraft designed to return to Earth non-destructively, regardless of whether it was going to land vertically or land like an airplane or land with a parachute, first slow down to subsonic speeds before getting to the phase of the flight where the landing system is invoked?

No. Go watch a Falcon 9 booster recovery <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_90o1KLkM> on Youtube; you’ll see that when it starts its landing burn it is ~5 miles up and flying engines first towards the ground at ~1300 miles per hour.

It slows down by burning stuff and making hot stuff go out one end. That end is the one worse for air drag, because it has all the bits where the hot stuff comes out.

> the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993.

Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump engines.

This is why I say people that say private capitalism is what moves the world tech forward are wrong. From Rockets, Nuclear, Robots, Internet, Cars, Planes, Semi Conductors, Satellites all these came about from government investment in loss making technology or by heavily subsidizing the production for war until it reached profitability.

I mean, both have a big role to play. You mention rocket tech, which is a perfect example of the strengths and weaknesses of public and private enterprise.

Public enterprise can be great because it enables societies to leverage huge amounts of capital (at one point, the US was spending 4% of GDP on the Apollo program each year--the equivalent of $1 Trillion/year today) to accomplish goals that are beyond the capacity of private industry at the time. It suffers from being totally divorced from the normal constraints of economy, and so tends to way overspend (4% of GDP is frankly insane) and to get stuck at local maxima (see SLS).

Private enterprise is basically the opposite. It can never match the government in terms of spending big to pull tech forward by decades--the profit margin doesn't really work that way. But it lavishly rewards the efficient allocation of capital, which (so long as there is meaningful competition) creates a drive to constantly improve tech. It's painful to think about where rocket tech would be without the recent advances born of private capital!

The point is, the archetypal inventor is someone who has a unique flash of insight that only they could have had. Your example is of something different: that with enough funding and smart people working on a problem, great things can be achieved. Elon didn't personally have almost any of the insights, but he did supply the vision and funding.

He supplied a lighting rod for negativity.

The first few launches were very difficult. A NASA project with 10 crashes would have been destroyed by the press and congress.

The superpower of Elon is to shield the technical team from the negativity, pipe it to null and post "close but no ciggar".

NASA's very early launches were hardly more reliable. But there was always an overlap with ICBM development and national defence. So reliability improved quickly, and one of the goals of the space program was to showcase that reliability.

Once Apollo was running the success rate was 100%, with no boosters lost - an incredible achievement, not just of tech but of project management.

NASA of the day didn't need shielding, because it was already doing the job with no excuses.

Well, only if you ignore Apollo 1. Overall Apollo was incredibly successful, but not 100%.

You know, on second thought: I don't recall Elon attracting all that much negativity before his recent escapades. Robert Downey Jr famously played Elon in Iron Man, and the audiences cheered. I think this is a case of "we were always at war with Eastasia".

I agree it's worse now. At that time the bad comments were like

fake quote> He is rich only because his father had an esmerald mine, and he can not even build rockets with 1960 technology.

Thanks - usually I understand what my downvotes are for, and stand by them. This instance would have left me puzzled without this explanation.

I would have thought that a leader is judged by their results, and regardless of personal feelings for Elon - one can't argue that he managed to build SpaceX where many others would have failed. Could NASA have built something just as good? Possibly, but history doesn't do hypotheticals.

[I'm not sure that I understand the first part of ypur comment, but just in case, I didn't downvote neither of ypur comments.]

> You can find endless examples once you start looking

My favorite examples are gunpowder, the printing press.

Both were known by the Chinese and Koreans for thousand years before the Europeans. However, it was the Europeans that began using gunpowder in handheld guns (Chinese used it for fireworks) and combined the printing press with metallic moveable types and oily ink, making it far more efficient.

Also: how much James Watt improved the already existing steam engine.

> Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented

Why do you keep giving engineering credit to a Paypal Billionaire? By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? I guess none other than opening a check book?

> By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin?

Why didn't BlueOrigin surpass SpaceX? Is it only a funding issue?

wait, do you think the reason is that elon musk personally helped invent stuff?

No, but if it's not a difference of "Musk(programmer) vs Bezos(businessman)" I would like to know why other companies or leaders with a lot of money didn't have such success. Is it only a size of bank account? To me it looks like a ceo or a leader of company has more correlation with success than "just a lot of money".

My take - a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".

Bezos made some pretty technologically prescient decisions too, the obvious example being the API mandate, which set the ball rolling for AWS. I think leadership can be a factor, but to me what you're doing is a massive simplification. In any case, I don't think being a programmer would make me more qualified than anybody else to make good decisions for a rocket building company.

> a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".

You do know Bezos has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton unlike Musk, right?

I have a computer science degree too, but looks like it doesn't make me more successful. So I'm still asking what is the difference that made SpaceX more successful than BlueOrigin.

Well to start with you should know Musk has never been a "Programmer"

https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creator-says-elon-m...

The evidence is:

> He asked, 'How do I run this Python script?'" Palmer said, per Crikey.

That is exactly what a programmer would ask, python scripts are not self contained they have a lot of dependencies, also typically you need to invoke them with a lot of parameters.

In addition not all programmers are python programmers, getting some commands you need in order to get started is just run of the mill when you get code from someone.

You can do a lot with 38 Billion dollars of US Government money. It's a very Socialist thing to do: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...

Yea, there are hundreds or even thousands of billionaires. Only one of them has developed a successful orbital launch company. That’s not exactly a high base rate.

And how many have tried? Not more than 5 would be my guess. We do not have enough data to make a conclusion.

The ones who didn’t try knew that they couldn’t do it. We do have enough data to conclude that money alone is not enough.

Musk happened to hire better engineers and programmers I guess

Both Musk and Bezos are businessmen. There is still competition among businessmen to do business the best way - directing the right people to work on the right things. But don't confuse this with actually making the products themselves. One can be a good businessman or a bad businessman, but this has nothing to do with engineering.

(Arguably, the best thing Musk did for SpaceX as a businessman was to delegate all the business to someone else. He tends to ruin companies where he does not.)

He seems to be the champion of using stainless steel for the rocket, which was a game changer.

Not a novel idea. The Atlas Family of ICMBs, the Thor/Delta Rockets, The Space Shuttle External tank, The R7 Russian rockets and the N1 Moon Rocket. They all did.

That is also the reason why patents are of limited duration.

Some things aren’t like that. GR comes to mind. (Hilbert was working on it also, but only because he started as a collaborator of Einstein.)

It’s one of the reasons I disagree with NDT and other popular scientists that Newton was the greatest scientist. Einstein was singular in that respect that he was the only one even thinking about spacetime as a geometric entity. Calculus and gravity, were already all things others were working on and making similar strides. Newton just got there first and while he’s definitely a unique genius and impressive in the breadth of things he accomplished, that takes away for me when comparing him with Einstein.

I think his most unique work may have been the contributions to optics but stacked up against a fundamental description of what gravity and time are that completely changed our thinking on it… Not to mention that still to this day 100 years later we’re building machines to verify some of Einstein’s predictions. Oh and he invented the idea of lasers despite not believing in quantum mechanics.

Not to mention that Newton’s foundational contributions to math and science stopped around 28 when he started focusing on alchemy and other things. By comparison Einstein kept making contributions to physics throughout his life and his contributions “stopped” when he focus on the grand unifying theory trying to bridge quantum mechanics and relativity, a problem still unsolved 70 years after his death despite an accelerating understanding and technology in the world of physics.

Not discounting Einstein's singular contributions, but he had help in putting Riemannian (also called Bolshai-Lobachevsky in other parts of the world ;)) geometry to use:

> This idea was pointed out by mathematician Marcel Grossmann and published by Grossmann and Einstein in 1913.[7]

(from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)

In most mathematical circles, Bolyai-Lobachevsky geometry is strictly a (family of non-Euclidian) hyperbolic geometry.

János Bolyai, not Bolshai. And certainly in the 1820s-1830s he investigated the Euclidean parallel postulate, arriving at a hyperbolic geometry in which it does not hold true (i.e., initially close parallel lines diverge), and eventually studying geometries which take no position on the parallel postulate. Lobachevsky also independently arrived at a hyperbolic geometry, and continued develop a substitute postulate for the parallel postulate.

However, all of the above is several long steps before developing differential geometry with its inner products encoding angles and distances on the tangent spaces at each point on an arbitrarily curved smooth manifold of higher dimensions, and an even longer one from the pseudo-Riemannian manifold of 3+1d General Relativity. Although many hands contributed to the positive inner product -> non-degenerate inner product, the reason anyone was doing that was because of Einstein's work on gravitation (in turn provoked in part by Poincaré's 1905 argument about Lorentz-invariance of the wave equation for gravitation, in the spirit of Special Relativity).

Thanks for the corrections and a deeper dive!

It is nationalist. Type in "Hungarian inventions".

You will see: computer (Neumann), holography, discovery of vitamin C, ballpoint pen, helicopter, electric locomotive, telephone exchange, Word and Excel, and so forth.

I mean, I am Hungarian, so what? Why should I be proud "to be Hungarian" because those things were invented by Hungarians (outside of Hungary, mostly in the US I believe)? I don't get it.

This is classic survivorship bias. We don’t know about the things that didn’t get invented because someone somewhere didn’t do a critical breakthrough, because those things don’t exist. Therefore, it’s easy for people to assume that everything eventually gets invented, and nothing really hinges on a single person.

We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.

> We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.

No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other critical technologies that were necessary to make steam engines more than a toy.

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

> We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier

My understanding is that no, it couldn't have happened at that time because metallurgy wasn't good enough at the time for anything beyond toys.

This kind of patriotism makes little sense to me. It's like football hooligans fighting over their favorite sports teams.

My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident of birth. I'll support my country when they do things I think are good. I'll support other countries when they do things I think are good. Supporting your own country even when they are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.

> My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident of birth [...] Supporting your own country even when they are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.

Would you say the same of your family?

If a family member were doing bad things, I would still love them and be loyal to them. But I would show that love by confronting them thoughtfully, not rejecting the family entirely. In that sense, our mutual family membership could hopefully become a means of calling them back to their senses, especially if multiple family members are involved in talking to them over a period of time.

> It's like football hooligans fighting over their favorite sports teams.

That take trivializes human institutions in which we are members. These institutions ought to be taken as sacred. When they fall, we fall. (Not so with a sports team losing to another team :)

Nations fall all the time. Humans go on. Most modern countries are not that old, because the previous countries fell. People are still around though.

Plus: if your country goes bad, your best move might be to take your family and get the hell out of there. There are plenty of recent examples.

A nation falling is a big deal. I'm surprised at how you hand-wave it away.

Yes, some falls were good. The falls of the Nazi Germany, the USSR, East Germany, and Nicolae Ceaușescu were very good, primarily because those regimes oppressed their populations and murdered tens of millions of people. Yet many falls were bad. The fall of Germany to the Nazi party, the falls of Russia and China to communism, and any invasion and subjugation of a free and noble people is a bad thing.

Let me ask you this rhetorically -- would you rather the USA be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, or the US government? Imagine the consequences of each -- I think you'd agree that each is objectively better or worse than others for specific reasons. If such a choice were presented, it would not be morally or practically neutral - it would carry tremendous implications for human flourishing (or suffering).

We ought to consider carefully and not hand-wave historical (or potential future) events that carry such massive consequences.

> if your country goes bad, your best move might be to take your family and get the hell out of there

Agreed, but that's a last resort. Many did so as Germany was falling to the Nazis, and as Russia and China were falling to communism. I have a friend whose parents escaped to Taiwan by holding on to the underside of a boat as it crossed the channel... I wouldn't tell them it wasn't a big deal. Many people who did so lost everything except their immediate family in the process.

So many people couldn't flee, though. And so much that had been built (people, skills, knowledge, families, institutions, relationships, social capital) was lost forever.

Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important? National identity is a relatively recent concept so it’s clearly not essential or fundamental to human culture. It’s not clear to me why I should care more about people in New York (2000 miles away but part of the same geopolitical entity) more than people in Brazil.

> Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important?

I take it as given that (a) individual human flourishing is an important and worthy goal, (b) love (seeking the good of others) and hard work are the principal means of attaining that goal, and (c) formal human institutions (like marriage, family, and country) are the best means of organizing the human relationships and activities that fall under [b].

Given (a), (b), and (c), it follows that:

- to promote the health and flourishing of those institutions is to promote human flourishing itself

- thoughtfully managing shared values and expectations of members in those institutions promotes flourishing of the institutions

- love and preference for other members of each institution promotes the health of its members and of the institution itself

I also posit (but don't have the space/time to work out the reasoning) that just as individual people should not live for themselves only, each institution must not exist merely for its own sake, but also for the good of those outside of it; that its own internal health and cohesion is an important prerequisite for being able to effectively benefit the rest of society; and that institutions that exist solely for their own sake with zero outreach are unhealthy.

However, to say that an institution is wrong or unhealthy because members of it love each other more than people outside the institution is to deny that the institution itself is a good thing. We intuitively know that healthy married people love each other more than others, and that healthy family members love each other more than others. In a healthy company, we work for the good of our own company first, not other companies. The same principle should apply to countries. To reduce the principle to a pithy saying: "Put your own [country's] oxygen mask on first."

> National identity is a relatively recent concept

I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Every successful society since ancient history, from local tribes to the great ancient empires to modern countries had (at a minimum) social cohesion, shared values, and a shared identity. Individual members of Visigoth and Viking tribes identified as Visigoths and Vikings and had a shared sense of identity; same with Greeks, Romans, Germans, French, English, Swedish, etc. The United States at its inception and for a long time afterwards was no exception.

This doesn't mean we should be unfriendly and not care about others. Love is not a zero-sum game. Members of families that are affectionate to one another also feel very loving to people outside the family. The healthiest countries in the last 100 years were also some of the best international partners and best places to travel...

Well, this is true for the airplane, but it really doesn't apply to every invention.

Some things only exist because a single person got too outside of the groupthinking, or decided to dedicate their life into making it.

Can you provide an example of this? There are a few inventions-via-serendipity (e.g. Teflon) where someone got lucky, but few that i can think of where the specific person who got lucky mattered. Kary Mullis and PCR maybe?

Some examples from Deep learning:

AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training convnets on GPU’s in 2009?

OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was only OpenAI training larger and larger language models.

TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman

In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1 person or group did not exist.

Il sorry to bomb your comment, but I saw on another thread that you followed CMU intro to DL and had a beautiful time doing all the homework.But I didn't find your contact info.

Do you happen to still have the homework questions/solutions somewhere ?

At the moment the new ones are locked behind CMU credentials.

You can find the homework questions in older iterations of the course: https://deeplearning.cs.cmu.edu/S21/index.html

I don’t have any of the code for the solutions.

The bicycle. It's a surprisingly recent invention despite its simplistic material and manufacturing requirements.

We've discussed bicycles before. The material is hardly simplistic. There wasn't much serendipity involved. Practical bicycles came soon after the necessary basic technology had been developed, including precision bearings and robust pneumatic rubber tires. This wasn't a case where we could have had bicycles a century earlier if someone had come up with the idea.

"practical bicycles" is nebulous, vague, and always means whatever you want it to mean to claim to be right.

Bicycles do not need precision bearings nor pneumatic tires, as proven by the fact that bicycles predate them by decades. Also radial style ball bearings were invented for bicycles. Bicycles were the catalyst for precision bearings, not the other way around. Similarly pneumatic tires were created for tricycles (long after pedal bicycles were already invented)

Yes we absolutely could have had 2 wheeled transportation centuries earlier. Roads, the actually necessary infrastructure, was long since a thing for carts and wagons.

Surprisingly, there’s also still no simple explanation for why a bicycle works. It’s easier to understand how a modern microprocessor works than a bicycle.

Who really "invented" computers? Babbage? Alan Turing? Konrad Zuse? John Von Neumann? Mauchley & Eckert?

Who invented calculus? Leibniz? Newton?

Same goes to the Fast Fourier Transform, CRISPR-CAS9, etc.

The fact of who was first honestly does not matter: they were all amazing pioneers.

Alberto Santos Dumont created the 'Demoiselle' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_Demoiselle)

Which was an amazing achievement for the time: It was (one of?) the first tail-plane configuration in the world. And also one of the first airplane to be mass produced.

This configuration is still used on almost all commercial airplane today and differed from the "canard" configuration of the Wright's flyer.

Even 120 years later, "La demoiselle" looks weirdly "modern" as an airplane configuration.

Santos Dumont had close competition by Jacob Ellehammer[1] who is probably only (mostly) known locally.

But truly pioneers: Building planes, helicopters and cars totally from scratch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Ellehammer

Well, the Wright brothers invented an aeroplane. Their most important contribution was the use of wing warping to allow the control of roll. Wing warping turned out to be less practical than the approach still used today: the aileron. A patent owned by the Wright's on wing warping caused a lot of pointless legal conflict and arguably slowed down the pace of innovation with respect to the problem[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron

I"m starting to wonder when, if ever, patents did not hinder technological advancement on the net.

Various improvements to machinery during the industrial revolution were only possible with vast amounts of investment upfront, and the patent system made that possible. You're not going to be building a factory powering steam engine at home, even if you've found a method that will increase its efficiency by a significant margin.

Of course, patents are only respected when a country is in the lead. Early America was notorious for espionage and strategically ignoring patents to bolster its own economy, and China doesn't really care about what patents you may have when one of their companies is competing with you.

Related, a good article on how a contributing factor to the founding of Hollywood as the world's movie capital was due to Thomas Edison's stranglehold on patents: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-th...

When the development of the innovation requires a bunch of up-front capital.

Or to expand this a bit more - they learned and documented how to have controlled flight. They were the first ones to have flights measured in hours. Big difference from just a one off flight.

(there is a great book about this https://share.libbyapp.com/title/1815407 )

This reminds me of a somewhat related topic - who won the space race? Growing up in Soviet Union, we were taught that it was the USSR - when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Then I came to the US, and was taught that it was the US, when Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon.

No-one ever really set the goalpost of the Space Race, so it can be whichever you want. I personally like to consider the Apollo–Soyuz mission as the true finish of the space race, where the two nations docked their spacecraft together, and an astronaut and a cosmonaut shook hands in space.

In the end the big winner of the Space Race was humanity, in the massive scientific leap forward that it created.

Best answer possible - too bad they couldn't align better in the long run (ie for humanity).

Thanks.

I think it's pretty obvious in hindsight that the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here. The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets. Putting a man on the moon showed that America was vastly more capable on a technical level, but that wasn't really the point of the space race.

It's also why governments are carefully watching North Korea's space program, even if they'll never be able to put a man on the moon. Their ability to launch a sattelite into orbit makes them a threat, whether or not they can make a moon lander has little real value beyond vanity.

> the US shifted the goalposts to claim victory here

On the one hand, yes absolutely.

On the other hand -- which is more exciting? The "space race" of getting the first man in space and back, or the "moon race" of getting the first man on the moon and back?

I think it's fair to say the "moon race" was a far greater event in human history, to set foot on another world. Yes, the US shifted the goalposts... but at the same time the new goalposts seem like the more momentous event in human history. Think of how people across the world tuned in for live TV footage of the moon landing.

> The real space race, having the ability to nuke any point on earth, was clearly won by the Soviets.

The US and the Soviets had operational ICBMs at pretty much the same time-- dueling milestones from 1957 to 1959.

Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs.

Then the US caught up and surpassed them.

Then both stagnated; Russia did a slightly better job in choosing priorities for human spaceflight; the US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight.

> Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs.

In the US the story is that because Soviet nukes were more crude than the US versions, which made them heavier and bulkier so the Soviets had to build their rockets bigger to have enough range. When the focus shifted to putting a man in orbit having a larger rocket to start with was an advantage and allowed the Soviets to achieve a number of firsts.

I do agree that declaring the race suddenly over with a man on the moon was a case of taking the ball and going home.

> I do agree that declaring the race suddenly over with a man on the moon was a case of taking the ball and going home.

See, I would characterize this differently-- after the US reached the Moon, Russia pretty much gave up-- gave up on the N1, Zond, etc.

Wouldn't the 'US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight' depend on when you want to plant the flag that the space race ended? If we go with what in the US we define as a man on the moon, the Soviets I believe were putting probes all over the place. The soviets were landing probes first on bodies in the 60s. While the US focused on the moon.

I guess that depends on what you define as the bounds of the space race. If we go to the fall of the Soviet Union, yea, I completely agree with your last statement. After we landed on the moon, we did start getting serious about probes and had a bunch of wins there with voyager and such.

> Wouldn't the 'US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight' depend on when you want to plant the flag that the space race ended?

I was talking about post-1970 stagnation.

Russia basically scaled everything waaaay back post 1970. You have Venera as a significant first/win, parity for a little while on Mars, and then the US unrivaled in the outer solar system.

From what I understand the US outnumbered the soviets in sheer number of missiles though. Early 1960s politicians fearmongered about soviet missile capacity in order to justify a huge expansion in military capabilities while the soviets lagged behind in raw numbers.

Both sides grossly overbuilt their nuclear missile capabilities. The maintenance costs forced them into partial disarmament treaties in the 80s and 90s.

That's not really the full story. The US didn't come up with the moon goal. It was the Soviets' plan already, which is why JFK publicly announced it in a speech: to force them into a public prestige battle. The Soviets had the habit of repeated private failure. If they achieved something, they'd announce it afterwards; if they failed, they kept quiet. The US broadcast launches on TV and pre-announced goals, which was a major propaganda effort and much more effective than post-flight releases.

Growing in the Soviet Union, you should also remember the story that the airplane was invented by Mozhaysky, radio by Popov, lightbulb by Ladygin, and so on. No one in the US disputes who the first man in space was - the narrative rather highlights the US achievements. The soviets (and Russia) take it to the next level. It took me a while to understand why none of my colleagues have ever heard of Ostrogradskiy and Kotelnikov theorems

Kotelnikov is known to the Wikipedia generation, since he's mentioned in the sampling theorem article.

It was the race that moon the US one. The USSR was the first into space both with a spacecraft orbiting and living beings.

Maybe people interpret what they learned differently but I don’t think they were taught the US won the space race. Of course the goalposts will be moved to claim the glory.

I wasn’t taught that it was Yuri who won but rather Sputnik.

I like to think of it as a contest of one-upmanship.

Eventually the US did something the Soviets could not in the most difficult category of space exploration, which is manned spaceflight. If they'd gotten their manned lunar program done, they would have kept the Space Race going, and the US would have had to find another first. But they didn't.

I grew up in the US. If you just make a list of space "firsts", the USSR was first at just about everything important.

It's quite obvious how embarrassed the US was at the whole thing.

When you take a non-zero-sum game and insist it's zero sum, you get subjective winners and losers.

If wasn't for all of the nukes involved behind the scenes, I'd say we all won.

It's just the morphogenetic field channeling things from the akashic records. It's all 'in the air'. Just need to have the right antennas :)

As a german i hadn't heard of the wright brothers until my 20s. Otto Lilienthal is the name associated with the invention of airplanes here.

Well, I wasn't convinced by the Brazilians' argument that catapults don't count, but then Otto Lilienthal's flights should also count. Either you want completely unaided flight, and Dumont did it first, or you don't, and Lilienthal's flights are the first.

Dumont did it first in the sense that he achieved a flight long enough, i.e. over 100 meter, in order to win the prize for such a flight that had been instituted a couple of years earlier.

A half of year before Santos Dumont, also in Paris, there had been other flight attempts that had succeeded to take off completely unaided, by rolling on wheels (by Traian Vuia), but the achieved lengths of sustained flight had been much shorter, too short to qualify for any prize.

So while the achievements of Santos Dumont are very commendable, the word "invention" is not really appropriate for them, because all he had done was to do better some of the things already done by others in their attempts to win the French flight prizes.

The Wright brothers have started from Otto Lilienthal's work. While their improvements have been extremely important, their work has also not started from zero, but it had built upon the work of the predecessors.

In the history of inventions, it is typically impossible to say that something has really begun with some inventor. Instead of that, the right way is to point to each inventor and show what they have done better than what existed before them.

Lilienthal flew with gliders. The Wright brothers claim the first powered flight (i.e. an airplane).

The Wright brothers have invented many components of an airplane, which made powered flight possible, but it seems inappropriate to say that they have invented an "airplane".

The idea of making an "airplane", with fixed wings and with screw propellers, had been widespread for most of the second half of the 19th century, and it had been discussed in countless publications and in "heavier-than-air" flight clubs.

However, before the Wright brothers, nobody had succeeded to build such an airplane that actually worked, the main reason being the lack of an appropriate system of aircraft controls, like that conceived by the Wright brothers.

The patent obtained by the Wright brothers, is formulated very well and of course it does not claim to have invented any new kind of flying machine, but it claims certain new and useful improvements in flying machines of the airplane kind (most of which refer to the aircraft control surfaces).

If they are the first to build an airplane that "actually worked", then why would it be inappropriate to say they invented an airplane?

It wouldn't be appropriate to say "they were responsible for 100% of the technological development and research that led to this machine" but if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.

Their invention patent (US 821,393) correctly claims the invention of a 3-axis airplane orientation control system, not the invention of the airplane, which is treated as a well-known class of flying-machines, which is improved by their invention.

An airplane without good aircraft controls could start to fly without problems, but it would normally crash sooner or later, either due to flight instabilities or because it had to eventually land somewhere.

Say, if I invent everything to make a bike work but the wheels just happen to be a teeny tiny too small to actually allow someone to ride it uninterrupted.

You come and adjust them. Did you just invent the bike? Or did you build upon my previous invention(s) and perfected it, making us both partial inventors?

You only get partial credit unless you figured out what, precisely, needed to be done, but had someone else do it for you.

'if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.'

People invent things. But "airplane" turned out to be much more than one thing. Not all of them were invented by Curtiss (a local favorite), or by Santos-Dumont, or by Lilienthal, Caproni, the Wrights, or whoever.

Not really disagreeing, but history and technology are both messy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...

I think it's fair to say someone invented a thing if they design and build the first one that actually works. The concept of an airplane had been around for a while by 1903, but nobody had one. Similarly today we have the concept of a warp drive. We even have that concept outside the realm of science fiction now, but we're far from having a working prototype and don't even know if a practical example can be built.

It's also fair to debate what qualifies as an airplane. If I were to list criteria, I would include two that the first Wright Flyer did not demonstrate: the ability to take off from level ground under its own power, and sufficient maneuverability to return to and land at the point of departure.

The 1903 did take off under its own power. The catapult came later.

I had the impression it took off downhill for that flight, failing my criterion, but it actually took off from level ground with a strong headwind. I'll give it partial credit; I don't think its rail would have been long enough in calm wind.

I know, but any practical airplane can take off in calm wind from level ground. The first Wright Flyer required a strong headwind or downhill angle.

The Flyer was on a rail with a wheeled cart. The fact that it moved forward under its own power (faster than Orville could run) demonstrated that it could take off in a calm, just that the rail would have had to be longer.

Their experiments with it ended when a gust flipped it on the ground and broke it beyond repair.

Or you want an American, in which case the Wright Brothers won

As is tradition.

The same is true to some extent for cars (Ford/Benz). LLMs will even answer differently depending on the language the question is asked.

Edit: I cannot actually reproduce this with the automobile question, but asking ChatGPT-4o about the inventor of TV yields different answers:

Asking in German yields Paul Nipkow and Philo Farnsworth, asking in English yields Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird

Asking about Radio inventors in German yields Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, Marconi, Fessenden. In English it yields Marconi and Tesla.

The only source that will respond Ford invented the car is a person who has no idea and is simply guessing the first name comes to mind. It can't really even be contested since Benz's and Ford's inventions are decades apart.

I've never been taught that Ford invented the car, but instead Ford invented the mass production of cars. Not really sure where "Ford invented car" comes from

Nobody claims Ford invented the car. Its undisputed in the mainstream that Karl Benz did. What Ford achieved was making it into a viable mass market product. Ford's inventions had less to do with the car itself and more with the process of mass production. Ford's system was incredibly influential and very wide reaching. But the car was very much invented and known before he did that.

Exactly. Ford didn't actually invent anything. Kinda like Jobs and Woz didn't invent the IC or CPU or even PC. Ford was in tune with the innovations of the time and composed them in a novel and appealing way. His success came from his skilled execution and were more financial and social than technical in nature. Ford marketed cars to the middle class, and paid his employees well enough to buy the products they built.

I have not actually heard that argument. It has always been noted that Benz invented the car, and Ford invented the assembly line, for cars.

Yeah, as an American I never was taught that Ford invented cars. He invented cheap cars.

Oldsmobile invented the assembly line for cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_E._Olds#Assembly_line

He was the first to mass produce cars. But given that cars and mass production already existed it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to mass produce cars.

About Radio here in Brazil there is other one: Roberto Landell de Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura

Thats actually more interesting that LLMs answer based on language questions are asked, I never thought to test that. It would be nice if we got to a point where you train an LLM to genuinely figure out these nuances and fix its own model.

Google, I suspect, would do the same, if you were in Texas coffee's origin would not get you the result that mentions Yemen, Ethiopia would be the first result. This is how I won a $100 bet with a Texan who insisted that google gave him Ethiopia. The trouble is, we were in the Middle East when asking google for the bet.

What? Even Ford Motor Company don't seem to claim that Ford made the first car. His Quadricycle was first ran in 1896, Benz's is from 1885...

If it makes you feel better, in the U.S. we learn that the Wright brothers used Lilienthal's glider data extensively in the R&D phases of their work. He managed to gather a lot of data on gliders and glide slopes which informed the brothers' earlier work. Their achievement summits their peers only in qualifications, the first:

- powered

- controlled

- heavier than air

- sustained

- flight

The Wrights did use Lilienthal's data for their earlier gliders, but it turned out to be off by a factor of 2. That is why the Wrights built a wind tunnel to determine the correct values.

Lol - when I studied aerospace in France the hagiography literature was all about Louis Breguet and Louis Bleriot. I don't recall mention (i.e. in general conversation, offhand references in non-formal literature, or on posters, etc.) about the Wright brothers.

Oddly I don't recall much mention of Alberto Santos-Dumont either so, go figure.

If you live in Germany, the Wright brothers may have "invented" the airplane, but Hans Grade was the person who made the airplane practically usable: :-)

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Grade

(and before, Otto Lilienthal invented the glider, i.e. he made the idea of heavier-than-air aircraft a reality:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal

)

> and before, Otto Lilienthal invented the glider, i.e. he made the idea of heavier-than-air aircraft a reality

The Wright brothers were very aware of Lilienthal and his contributions.

Wilbur Wright, speaking to the Society of Western Engineers in Chicago, September 1901:

> The difficulties which obstruct the pathway to success in flying-machine construction are of three general classes: (1) Those which relate to the construction of the sustaining wings; (2) those which relate to the generation and application of the power required to drive the machine through the air; (3) those relating to the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight. Of these difficulties two are already to a certain extent solved.

> This inability to balance and steer still confronts students of the flying problem, although nearly eight years have passed. When this one feature has been worked out, the age of flying machines will have arrived, for all other difficulties are of minor importance.

> Herr Otto Lilienthal seems to have been the first man who really comprehended that balancing was the first instead of the last of the great problems in connection with human flight. He began where others left off, and thus saved the many thousands of dollars that it had theretofore been customary to spend in building and fitting expensive engines to machines which were uncontrollable when tried. He built a pair of wings of a size suitable to sustain his own weight, and made use of gravity as his motor.

> Lilienthal not only thought, but acted; and in so doing probably made the greatest contribution to the solution of the flying problem that has ever been made by any one man. He demonstrated the feasibility of actual practice in the air, without which success is impossible. Herr Lilienthal was followed by Mr. Pilcher, a young English engineer, and by Mr. Chanute, a distinguished member of the society I now address. A few others have built gliding machines, but nearly all that is of real value is due to the experiments conducted under the direction of the three men just mentioned.

> We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five hours’ practice, spread out; in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/In...

The Wright brothers found that Lilienthal’s method of controlling an airplane was never going to work, and devised something that would. That was their invention. Nothing more, nothing less.

And Konrad Zuse invented the computer.

And the computer mouse was not invented by Douglas Engelbart at Xerox PARC, but by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken:

> https://www.heise.de/news/Auf-den-Spuren-der-deutschen-Compu...

> https://www.zeit.de/news/2019-05/14/deutscher-erfinder-gibt-...

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Mallebrein

Quote from the first link:

"Vor einem knappen halben Jahr feierte die Technikwelt den 40. Jahrestag der "Mother of all Demos", die am 9. Dezember 1968 die Computermaus an die Öffentlichkeit brachte. Demo-Leiter Douglas Engelbart gilt seitdem als Erfinder des immer noch genialsten und griffigsten Eingabegeräts der Informatik.

Diese Ansicht muss jedoch korrigiert werden, denn schon einige Wochen vorher erschien eine Publikation der Firma Telefunken, die ein Input-Instrument vorstellte, das an Monitoren hing und funktionell der Engelbart-Maus gleichkam: die so genannte Rollkugel. Seit den frühen 70er-Jahren wurde sie zusammen mit Telefunken-Rechnern verkauft und in der Praxis eingesetzt, und mindestens ein Exemplar hat in einem Museum überlebt."

Google Translate:

"Almost half a year ago, the technology world celebrated the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos," which introduced the computer mouse to the public on December 9, 1968. Since then, the demo's leader, Douglas Engelbart, has been considered the inventor of what is still the most ingenious and handy input device in computer science.

This view, however, must be corrected, because a few weeks earlier, a publication by the Telefunken company appeared, introducing an input device that hung from monitors and was functionally equivalent to the Engelbart mouse: the so-called trackball. Since the early 1970s, it was sold alongside Telefunken computers and used in practice, and at least one example has survived in a museum."

and Karl Benz the car.

And they did! They both literally did.

And if you ask a French person you'll get an answer that no, it was the Bleriot monoplane of 1907 and the developments that followed from it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Bl%C3%A9riot

If you're French, it's Clément Ader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader

Or the Montgolfier brothers! That was the first time humans went up in the air.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers

I was surprised the first time I heard Americans attribute flight to the Wright brothers. (For reference, I was educated in Belgium)

The Wright brothers stood on the shoulders of their peers, in an age of focus on flight similar to today's focus on LLM-based AI systems. Lots of money and time were put into achieving flight, and lots of people achieved some version of it.

The Wright brothers famously used data collected by Otto Lilienthal on glide slopes for unpowered gliders. They reproduced that data with their own gliders.

Wilbur Wright once wrote, "Lilienthal was without question the greatest of the precursors, and the world owes to him a great debt."

But Lilienthal died in an accident before adding the key feature of power, necessary to achieve powered flight.

The Wright Brothers worked on control surfaces for a while, then turned to power. They notably didn't invent the internal combustion engine, nor did they invent or build theirs. They contracted out the work, with specifications.

The site at Kitty Hawk is favorable because of a slope and prevailing wind (it's an awesome place to visit). But the Wright Flyer II flew powered flight in Ohio in 1904. And then the Flyer III flew in 1905, again in Ohio. They again returned to Kitty Hawk in 1905, got rid of the catapault, and worked to start securing military contracts.

Europe, particularly France had a very active scene in flight research. When the Wright brothers' achievment made it to France in 1906, it was publicly ridiculed, no doubt creating the information environment for European sponsored researches to make claims.

The Wrights were not the first to fly, but they were the first in a collection of qualifications

- powered

- controlled

- heavier than air

- sustained

- flight

The technical base that enabled them also existed elsewhere, including Europe. A lighter, more powerful engine, better control surfaces, and a better design could easily surpass their design, and those technologies were improving rapidly. It's clear Santos-Dumont was an accomplished aeronautist, but was a couple years late hitting the qualifications the Wrights had already achieved and in some ways didn't achieve a few of them -- he notably used a hybrid lighter than air system to achieve takeoff in 1906. Insufficient to achieve the award he was shooting for. He later achieved it, with a wholly unique design, which is still remarkable.

If the Wright brothers had crashed and died during their development, the world would have still had flight in the end.

The Wrights actually found that Lilienthal's glider data, especially the specifics about airfoil design, was terribly inaccurate (the closer they got to replicating his designs, the worse their gliders performed). It was only after they built a wind tunnel and used it to validate the performance of various airfoil shapes that they could stabilize their gliders enough to think about making them powered. In many ways, the Wright's greatest advancement was abandoning the established knowledge of the field, including Lilienthal's, and validating their design experimentally from base principles.

When Wilbur Wright first demonstrated his airplane (a Model A somewhat modified while repairing the damage caused in shipping) in Le Mans, it was immediately apparent to the mostly enthusiastic crowd that this was the first fully controlled flight any of them had seen - a tight two-mile circuit with a controlled landing near the launch point. Many of those present would have been well acquainted with what Santos-Dumont and other pioneers had previously achieved.

> They contracted out the work, with specifications.

No, they designed the engine and hired a machinist (Charles Taylor) to make it.

I'm happy to be corrected, but my recollection was that they provided some specifications, what we would call SWaP today, and some sketches to support, and Taylor designed, built, and tested the engine.

The funny thing is that today the separation of aircraft and engine design persists.

I'm sure Taylor contributed to the design. But Taylor was hired to do it as an employee.

The Wrights contacted multiple engine makers who all refused the job.

> But Taylor was hired to do it as an employee.

I think that is overly reductive. Regardless of if someone is paid for a thing, the creation is still theirs.

I have been paid to solve problems, but the solution was my creation.

> what we would call SWaP today

This in a new term to me. I believe it means Size, Weight, and Power. Specifically as an optimization problem. The modern version includes cost as well which was probably less of a concern with the Wright Flyer.

https://www.baesystems.com/en-us/definition/what-is-swap-c

Like most human endeavors where a technology is coming of age, there was a full aviation industry of hobbyists and nascent entrepreneurs. Most of them were little known by outsiders and on occasion some of them were put in the public spotlight because they had an interesting success or a whimsical failure.

Just take a look at the L'Aerophile gazette that started on the late 1800s. Similarly to computers, it's like reading the early editions of Byte magazine. There was a profuse number of people and small businesses from all over the world looking for collaboration with different goals in mind, selling their products and exchanging, stealing and improving on ideas of each other:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344143803/date https://archive.org/details/larophile08besa

This farmer in New Zealand also apparently invented powered flight first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

Also, if we are talking X-rays, in Ukraine it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Puluj, not Röntgen. Although, to his credit, the latter apparently did cite Puluj when using the X-ray emitting Puluj Lamp (Röntgen attended his lectures after all).

Wow, that's more of a rabbit hole than I realized. There are more claims to first flight than are even listed in these threads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...

This one is very steampunk (and batman) like! It's also literally steam powered

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_Avion_III

Once upon a time I was sharing a lab with Brazilian students in France. Some of them are doing aerospace engineering degree and I asked who are their potential employers in aerospace industry expecting the normal suspects of Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin or Dassault Aviation. Casually, however, they mentioned Embraer as the potential employer and according to them it's one of the largest aeroplane manufacturers globally which is based in Brazil [1]. To be honest I've to double-check the name and they're not wrong.

[1] Embraer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer

Also radio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura

The correct link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Popov_(physicist) of course :)

There's an article that goes over various claims:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_airplane_f...

In the US, the Smithsonian Institution claimed that Samuel Langley, not the Wrights, was the inventor of the airplane. His Aerodrome #6 flew nearly a mile in 1896, but this machine was not really controllable, and Langley's subsequent prototypes regressed, ending with an ignominious flop into the Potomac river on December 8, 1903, nine days before The Wrights' successful tests at Kitty Hawk.

Not coincidentally, Langley was the secretary of the Smithsonian, and in addition, his claims were promoted by Glenn Curtiss in his attempts to overthrow the Wright patents. As the dispute heated up, the Wrights loaned the flyer to the London Science Museum, where it remained until after Orville's death.

It feels like every country has it's own "we actually invented airplanes" story. Growing up I heard form my parents, who are from a little-talked about country, claim that their country was the one that invented airplanes.

I think it's similar to the lightbulb. The availability of certain other technologies allowed for an explosion in invention leading to many simultaneous "discoveries" of the same basic inventions. In the US it seems we prioritize the documentation through the patent system to ascribe credit

The Kiwis too have their own "invented the airplane" guy (Pearse?) Seems a lot was happening at that point in history.

New Zealand did it first!

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/forgottensilver

Who broke Engima -- the German encryption used during WWII?

Polish mathematicians.

Depends on who you want to credit I suppose. Such huge tasks are usually accomplished in bits by many people.

That one is a little different, as both Poland and the UK considered breaking the Enigma machine a state secret until the 1970s.

That Polish mathematicians broke the codes, and shared this information with the British, is taught in the UK.

My understanding (from school in England) is the British codebreakers' contribution was to scale up the scale of the codebreaking, by using lots of machines and their own mathematical innovations.

When I was a kid I was a big Wilber and Orville fan, but then read a story about Gustav Whitehead, and was flabbergasted that I'd been lied to. I've never quite trusted teachers or historians since ... so it was an excellent lesson.

Tangential to this... Wright brothers lived and worked in Ohio, but the first flight happened in North Carolina due to its wind conditions and soft sand. In the early 2000's (if I remember right) North Carolina came out with a license plate with the image of the Wright Flyer and a slogan of "First in Flight". Ohio then came out with a license plate with "Birthplace of Aviation". A bit more on this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#State_rivalry

I think there is countless number of similar cases. One I recently came across was what is called Raman spectrometry in a large chunk of the world, but is still called "combinational scattering of light" in Russia after the term used by Russians Landsberg and Mandelshtam, who are believed to have independently discovered the same, may be even by tiny fraction of time earlier.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Landsberg#Discovery_of...

There were many pre-airplane aircraft.[1] Many people built gliders, and some of them worked. There were attempts at powered flight using steam engines (too heavy), clockwork (not enough energy storage), and rubber bands (well, why not, it works at toy size).

The real insight of the Wright Brothers was to focus on stability and control. Lilienthal got this - he flew about 2,000 glider flights, before dying in a crash before he got to power. Langley (NASA Langley is named after him) was trying for inherently stable aircraft rather than controllable ones. That's quite possible, but add too much stability and you can't maneuver much.

Somebody was going to succeed at this by the early 1900s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines

Shout out also to Lyman Gilmore, a resident of Grass Valley, CA who had a slightly plausible claim to first powered flight in May 1902. No one takes the claim too seriously but the guy did have some interesting early aviation experiments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman_Gilmore

Same thing with the internet, a dozen countries claim they invented it.

Thanks to a mix of chauvinism and great-man-theory, we often forget that science is an international, collective and incremental effort.

They didn't even mention the name "Lilienthal" who the Wright Brothers knew to have flown a heavier than air craft before they did...

In Rissua Alexander Mozhaysky sometimes considered an inventor of the airplain or at least mentinoed alongside Wrigth brothers when aviation history is discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Mozhaysky

IMHO arguing about who was the first it's good to keep in mind that: 1. inventions don't happen in a vacuum - they rely on the work of predecessors 2. some inventions/discoveries are mande by different people/teams independently around the same time.

In other places, Abbas ibn Firnas is taught as the inventor of flight (glide) in 9th century. https://mideast.unc.edu/flight-of-fancy/.

>> He is credited with a powered hop of 11 m (36 ft) made on 18 March 1906

Revisionist History like this fascinates me.

It is very well documented, with written texts, witnesses and even a handful of photographs that the Wright brothers had functional manned aircraft 3 years prior in 1903...

Yet I've personally seen Romanian postal stamps that credit Vuia with "the first flight" for him managing to jump just 11m (36 ft) in a plane.

See also New Zealand's Richard Pearse, who achieved powered flight either slightly before or after the Wright Brothers (definitions and accounts vary). He wasn't into fame or being first or self-promotion, so the records and lack thereof are a bit frustrating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

There's a great No Such Thing as a Fish podcast episode that talks about him: https://audioboom.com/posts/8641985-no-such-thing-as-a-honey...

The truth is: We will never know for sure.

Have a look at the German aviation pioneer "Gustav Weißkopf" aka "Gustave Whitehead":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead

I was just at the Outer Banks and I walked through the memorial/park they have there. It was very well done and I left feeling very inspired and motivated.

Then I went home and watched a documentary explaining all the stuff that happened after their success at Kittyhawk. Pretty sad that they took the patent/scarcity approach and stopped innovating. It was a cautionary tale to me to never let your foot off the gas once you’ve found something that works.

The wright brothers invented a slingshot, not an airplane.

You might even say that George Cayley invented powered flight a century earlier. He just couldn't find a motor light enough to actually implement it.

Then I'll claim Leonardo da Vinci almost did it with his aerial screw in the 15th century ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw

I highly recommend this book: Sky High!: A Soaring History of Aviation especially for those with children as a fun illustrated history of the individuals and their contributions to making modern aviation possible today. Suffice to say and as other commenters said, no one individual or pair of individuals made the airplane.

I think a separate and (to me, at least) more interesting question is why the US seems to have been (and is still now) so good at commercializing and deploying new technologies.

Depends on when you're talking about, imo post WW2 so much happened here because we survived the war pretty much entirely intact so our industry could continue to boom while the rest of the world rebuilt. That's always been my prevailing theory about the rabid success of the later half of the 20th century.

>“They didn’t take off on their own,” said Márcio Bhering Cardoso, the former director of the Brazil’s national aerospace museum. “They needed help.”

Let's also discount all rocket launches near the equator, as this is also cheating.

The inventor of the aeroplane (to the extent that the question even has an answer) doesn't depend on what country you're in!

How many legs does a dog have if I call it's tail a leg?

The way the headline is written reminds me of a popular theory in Mexico that Thomas Alva Edison was born in Zacatecas State in Mexico.

This thread seems like a good example of how to subtly be negative and breed cynicism.

Nitpick (see pedantic and mostly irrelevant replies to the excellent top comment.

Who cares, anyway? Whatabout all the other things that have ever happened? (see 2nd comment, 3rd comment)

More nitpicking, 4th comment

Top comment, and further down, the comments and discussion are quite good. I do wonder about how large an impact a targeted, small amount of astroturfing can accomplish. just boost/inject some cynicism and negativity into the top 2-4 comments, nothing too obvious. Just enough to poison the well a bit.

you got it backwards

Ohio: Birthplace of Aviation (wright brothers born/lived in Ohio)

North Carolina: First in flight (first powered flight was in NC)

Relatedly, who invented the television? Marconi or Baird?

Neither. Farnsworth did. Maybe you're asking about the radio, was it Marconi or Tesla?

Also Roberto Landell de Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura

And John Logie Baird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#First_public_...

And in New Zealand you may credit Pearse - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

Somebody at WaPo taking a stand against Bezo's "America, liberty, innovation" memo

Beat the paywall link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250324104124/https://www.washi...

Relatedly, just listened to one of the oldest Engines of Our Ingenuity episodes: 32 -- Wright and Langley.

> Curtiss went to work, strengthening the structure, adding controls, reshaping it aerodynamically, relocating the center of gravity -- in short, making it airworthy. In 1914 he flew it for 150 feet, and then he went back and replaced the old motor as well. On the basis of Curtiss's reconstruction, the Smithsonian honored Langley for having built the first successful flying machine.[...] In 1942 the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Abbot, finally authorized publication of an article that clearly showed the Langley reconstruction was rigged.

https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/32

1907 in France (by a Brazilian) vs 1903 in the USA

> Brazilians hear a different story: that the true inventor of the airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont — commonly described here as “the father of aviation.”

Also watch enthusiasts - one of Cartier (who invented the pilots watch) models is the Santos Dumont.

I believe Santos Dumont did it because: 1. Spite 2. He was a much cooler person

The US has claimed much more for much less in the past don't @ me.

Similar: Who invented the automobile, telephone, computer? The answer likely depends on your country of origin.

Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles has an excellent video on this topic. The Wrights did in fact invent the airplane first and provided extensive detailed documentation showing their work. Alberto Santos-Dumont was working with extremely primitive propellers, basically canoe paddles, that couldn't get the job done. He and others recreating his designs later used Wright-designed propellers to get his designs into the air. The Wrights being the first is further evidenced by them being the first to both discover and solve the adverse yaw effect, without doing this controlled flight is impossible. Alberto Santos-Dumont's designs had not accounted for this, showing that he hadn't flown.

Some argue that the Wright's flights don't count because they used a "rail" (long piece of wood acting as a runway, because runways did not then exist) or used a catapult. Both of these arguments are bullshit, the catapult argument in particular because their first flights at Kitty Hawk didn't use a catapult.

And they only used a wooden rail the first year at Kitty Hawk, when they only had a glider. They had decided to tackle the problem of control first and propulsion later. The glider took off by sliding downhill on a rail, while the Flyer they built the next year took off under its own power on level ground.

Not only that, but they were the first to realize that the tables of lift published by whatshisname the French guy were bogus. They built a wind tunnel so that they could make their own measurements of lift and drag. Weirdly, the wind tunnel had been invented ~50 years earlier! Apparently most of the Europeans who were playing with gliders that whole time didn’t even know about wind tunnels or they might have thought to put two and two together.

It seems like the propellers worked fine.

> On 23 October, Santos-Dumont presented himself at Bagatelle with the Oiseau de Proie II, a modification of the original model. The plane had been varnished to reduce the porosity of the fabric and increase lift. The rear wheel had been removed. In the morning he limited himself to manoeuvring the aircraft across the field, until the propeller shaft broke. It was repaired in the afternoon, and the plane was moved into position for an official attempt. An expectant crowd was present. At 4:45 pm, Santos-Dumont started the engine.[107] The plane lifted off and flew for 60 metres,[26]: 18 without taking advantage of headwinds, ramps, catapults, slopes, or other devices. The flight had taken place solely by the aircraft's own means, and Europeans at the time believed it was the first such achievement.

That is with a wright propeller, almost 3 years after the first powered flight of the wright flyer.

So, the Europeans at the time believed it was the first such achievement, but Dumont somehow was able to get hold of some propellers nobody in Europe heard about? Seems a bit far-fetched.

As I said in another comment, the Wright Brothers were pretty secretive about their works and it wasn't until 1908 that people in Europe knew about them.

This is the sort of propeller he was trying to use before getting the Wright design. It doesn't work:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj...

https://tegustanlosaviones.blogspot.com/2019/02/14-bis.html

How he could've got the Wright design when nobody in Europe have heard about the Wright experiments by the time Dumont flew his plane? Truth is, the Wright Brothers were pretty secretive about their works and it wasn't until 1908 that people in Europe knew about them.

Also, by this photo, that propeller seems to be working: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Santos_-_Nov12_1906.jpg