I think you are still giving them too much credit for a "shining decade". The public record shows differently. It is enlightening to find out how much was done from 1903-1908 when the Wrights refused to do public demonstrations. It is also enlightening to read the record of correspondences with international experts on how to do improve what they couldn't get working by tinkering. Furthermore, it is revealing to read about the coercive agreement they made with the Smithsonian to allow them to take possession of the Flyer.
I don't take any pride in knowing that the general public has been fooled. Contemporaries of the Wrights found it quite unethical (as scientists and engineers) to claim that a catapulted flight was truly a milestone in "powered" flight. Add to that the secretive, stalling, punitive business practices, and their unwillingness to give credit to other, and I place the Wright Bros. in the same category as Enron.
Excuse yourself. The Wrights only claimed to have invented wing-warping. It had been used in Europe long before their time, and they had the papers in their collection as proof of prior knowledge.
No one ever implied that it wasn't functional and applicable to some forms of flight, but it was not responsible for the widespread technology that made powered flight viable... then or now.
I believe you are sincere in your description of what you know to be true from the general popular sources. The deeper you go, the uglier it gets! But, it also reveals the wonders of true Scientist (such as Langley) and a true innovators (such as Curtiss).
the rights did not invent wing warping. they invented a SYSTEM. a way to COUPLE wing warping (airleron or roll axis) with RUDDER (yaw access) to get effective stable control of the aircraft (they did not know much about dihedral then I am guessing)
No one ever implied. YES they did. you CLEARLY did not read the post I replied to.
I even CLIPPED it to be specific that I was replying to where the poster I was replying to had said.
I quote
"They clung to dead-end technology like wing warping."
So again Excuse yourself.
It amazes me. they gave a massive portion of their SOUL to developing their airplane. what the HELL is wrong with wanted to get rewarded for it. Being in the history books does not put FOOD on the table.
Curtiss STOLE their idea that was what they were trying to prevent.
8-9 PM EST - "Return to Kitty Hawk" - An attempt to re-create the historic
1903 Wright Brother's Flight at Kitty Hawk.
9-11PM EST - "Wright Brothers' First Flight" - A team of engineers attempt to build an exact working replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer.
History Channel:
9-11 PM EST - "Wright Challenge" - Four teams of plane builders try to make working replicas of the 1903 Wright Flyer
I think the "Return to Kitty Hawk" on Discovery is about a Wright Flyer that's scheduled to fly Wednesday. The "First Flight" show right after that, I am not sure if that's a re-run of a special on the building of that Flyer (they had a show a few months back) or something new.
The Wright Challenge on the History Channel - That may be brand new with coverage of one (or more?) Wright Flyers that are supposed to fly Wednesday.
You are as bright as Saddam's last hiding place. Get out from behind your computer and TV set once in a while and read something more informative than comic books and Twinkie wrappers.
The only reason we caught Saddam was an informant who needed $25,000,000 told us about where and when to look. He successfully evaded a major multi- BILLION dollar effort for months.
John DeMar wrote: > ... They claimed the best ideas of others, kept their design a secret, > received a ridiculously broad patent, got a judge to ignore legal > challenges, and they refused to demonstrate or even show the plane > publicly for many years while fighting off the real innovators in > court and through the Press. The tactics used by the Wrights were a > setback for the birth of aviation. If it weren't for a World War, the > stalemate could have continued for years.
Partially correct, as you omit something: By 1917 Glenn Curtis also began threatening to sue other aircraft manufacturers to protect his own patents [Invention & Tech, Fall 2003]. The patent wars were not one-sided. The U.S. government catalyzed an agreement that gave the Wright Co. and Curtiss Co. $2M each as a one-time settlement. As you say, WWI triggered this agreement.
He got the last laugh. In 1929 the Wright Co. and Curtiss Co. merged to form the Curtiss-Wright Co.--note who's name came first. However, by then Orville was no longer associated with the company (except in name), as he had sold his company back in 1915 to a group of investors--who merged it with a company formed by another famous "Glenn".
John, the Wrights made mistakes, so did a lot of others. You might have done things differently if you had been in their shoes. I know I probably wouldn't have achieved a tenth what they did, and for that reason alone I celebrate what they did this day.
What I found interesting in my research was how little this new company did.
Their last good product was the 9-cylinder Wright Cyclone. The P-36 was hardly anything to brag about. And the P-40 was simply a rehash of the P-36, albeit a generation later, and hence a generation behind the times. By the start of the war, the P-40 was two generations behind the times. That Chenault's group could win with it only shows what a true genius he was.
Replacement designs and follow on programs all looked like rehashes of the P-40, and none of them ever came to fruition. The SB2C was never well liked in the Navy, either.
Production of the P-40 continued at a steady pace of 4000 planes per year (IIRC) throughout the war, while other manufacturers were building factories, and building planes in the those unfinished factories, and ramping production numbers from 0 to 10's of thousands. For three+ years, CW continued making the same, obsolete plane at the same, slow pace.
It's a pretty sad end to an otherwise incredible story.
I think you mean Cyclone 18, R-3350, powering the last recip jobs like Connies and Skyraiders, and TurboCompound R-3350 in SuperConnies- 3,700HP each: the true last gasp for high HP piston engines.
But in France 1940, the Export Hawk 75 had about the best record, 311 victories for 29 pilots lost, of 130 Hawks flying.
no, thank the Gov. spec for a single speed blower, rather than going the route of two stage, two speed blower or turbocharger to keep its performance past 15k
did well on the Russian Front in Soviet hands, too. more rugged, and more maneuverable than the P-51, just not as fast at altitude. The only US craft that could outturn it was the Wildcat and Bearcat.
Its just that that Zero and Oscar could outturn any Allied aircraft.
For the P-40, about 14K built. Thats about 4,000 more than P-38, and about 2,000 less than the P-51 or P-47, while costing less, $52K less than the P-38, $41K less than the P-47, and $6,600 less than the P-51
BTW, I agree Curtiss did build some turkeys like the Helldiver and Seamew at the end.
John, I find the whole tone of your posts disturbing. You don't seem to be trying to set the historical record straight as much as you seem to have a vendetta against the Wrights. The Wrights were not "tinkerers." Although they did not have a degree (not even high school), they were, by any objective, funtional definition, excellent engineers. The were the first ones to take a "systems approach" to the problem of flight. They took the problem, identified it's component parts, solved each of the sub-problems, then re-integrated it back into a fucntioning system. Specifically, they made the following advances that had not been done by anyone to that point:
1) They identified the four basic functions of flight: lift, stability, control and propulsion. Without all four you can't fly. For example a kite without a tail has lift, but no stability. A balloon has lift and stability, but no control. They first proved lift, stability and rudimentary (roll only) control via wing warping with their 1899 kite. They succesfully scaled it up to a man-carrying size with their (thethered) 1900 glider (the point where Langley failed). They added pitch control (but it didn't work very well) with the 1901 glider and finally yaw control with the 1902 glider. Propulsion, of course, was the last piece of the puzzle added with the 1903 Flyer.
2) They built the first systematic database of aerodynamic shape-properties. Like any good researchers, the surveyed the literature for existing work before they started (you called this "stealing" or something similar). Octave Chanute forwarded to them Langley's property tables. When they tried to apply them, with the
1901 glider, the performance was so poor that they eventually came to the conclusion that Langley's data were garbage, threw it all out and started compiling their own. They did it by methodical experimentation in a wind tunnel of their own design, testing hundreds of shapes and meticulously recording the results.
3) They correctly indentified gust instability leading to roll coupling as the thing that killed Lillienthal. This lead to the addition (in the '02 glider) of yaw control that completed the 3-axis control platform.
They were far from perfect, though. After admitting that they needed yaw control, the first rudder they put on the '02 glider was not moveable! It's only after crashing the glider after a side gust that they admitted they needed to be able to steer in all three axes. Also, their solution to gust sensitivity was to put a severe amount of negative dihedral into the lower wing. This, along with the forward mounted elevators, moved the aerodynamic center of the airplane forward past the pilot, making the airplane fundamentally unstable. The only reason they could fly it, was that they had practiced so much.
The Smithsonian wanted nothing to do with the Wrights as long as either of the brothers was still alive. After all, their little shoestring project had succeeded in humiliating Samuel Langely and his big splashy, government-funded project. Langley, was, of course, director of the Smithsonian. The '03 Flyer spent it's first few decades on display in the Royal Museum in London, included being exposed to the Blitz of WW II. How ironic if one of von Braun's V2's had taken it out!
Check your facts, please. The '03 Flyer was not catapulted. It had a rail for guidance, but 100% of the flight energy came from the engine. The catapult was introduced with the '04 Flyer.
Oh, that's right, I forgot about the massive cash flow into the Wright company due to bookkeeping fraud. You can hash it anyway you want, but controlled, powered, human-carrying heavier-than-air flight did not exist before the Wrights. Their brilliance as researchers and developers was matched only by their ineptitude as manufacturers. Their lawsuit against Curtis (and others) is not unprecidented. Harry Seldon tried to patent the automobile in the 1890's. Every manufacturer had to pay a royalty to Seldon for every automobile manufactured, regardless of design, until Henry Ford successfully sued him in the mid '00s.
The Wrights may have been secretive, but so was Goddard. I think that's a better analogy, except that RHG had no desire to try and profit from his research, although he did patent a lot of his discoveries.
I enjoyed reading your points, Jack. It may be that you are leaning toward selecting and embellishing certain accomplishments as you have seen them published. I believe the Wrights put in a lot of individual effort into their systematic approach. Many tinkerers and hobbyist are quite thorough and systematic, but it doesn't mean they are the inventors and innovators of what they piece together. The good ones recognize their sources and share their knowledge, for a profit or in the public domain.
You should check to see if you can identify which claims and photos used the catapult and which did not. Try to verify this with independent eyewitness accounts. You will find it is purposely vague and difficult to substantiate. You will also find that it is much easier to locate reports of public demonstrations and independent witnessed records by many other "flying machine" builders and inventors throughout the same period.
I have come to my personal conclusions, based on a great deal of evidence, much of it their own writings, that they were often unethical, misleading to the public, disruptive to the true advancement of the field of aviation, and not worthy to be recognized for all that is claimed in the modern popular historic image. I have found that the more people allow themselves to be open minded about the total picture, and allow themselves to look at multiple sources, they seem to at least come to the reluctant conclusion that the Wrights should not be held as highly as many of the true inventors in American history.
The Wrights had the opportunity to do much more with what they added to the experimental knowledge of the day. They decided to take the low road while many others, working before and after them, continued working to advance the field of aviation. It's a shame that the general public doesn't understand the bigger picture.
Of course, there are many other technologies we use that are taken for granted by the average person. And few of the names of the significant contributors are recognized for their accomplishments. Textbook writers feed the K-12 system with easy-to-remember, white-washed stories based on non-scholarly sources that perpetuate the problem. And it is easy to be lured in by those who are best at self promotion. But then again, that's what America is all about.
That I can vouch for. My daughter has a small perhaps 16 page set of photocopied biographies of famous folks. Reading the 3 pages on Neil Armstrong was a joke. My wife raked the sections on Marco Polo and Dr. Livingston. It's not just dumbed down for 4th graders. It's written with incredible bias and a definite "white mans" slant. It makes for interesting realizations when these kids are old enough to actually learn the truth. We confronted the teacher during a parent teacher meeting a month ago, and she was ignorant of the errors, stating that they can only work with the material they have. She also made it clear that their goal is to teach to the standards tests.
Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!
My source for this is Al Bowers, chief aero engineer at NASA Dryden and a consumate Wright expert. He has a complete set of Wilbur's notebooks (published postumously after Orville's death in 1948 as per their wishes). I've known Al for 15 years now, and whenever I travel to southern California, I make a point of detouring through the desert to visit him if I can. We do long-into-the-night discussions on airplanes and rockets. The last time I was down there, about two years ago, the subject was the Wrights since Al was consulting to the "Wright Experience" who was just getting started with their replica project. His knowlege of the Wright's technical achievements is profound and we spent hours delving into the subtlties of their insights and technical solutions.
Give me a better definition, then. By your account, Thomas Edison was just a tinkerer with a support staff.
Perhaps, but that has nothing at all to do with their techincal accomplishments. You seem to be arguing that because they didn't do social good with their invention, that their technical accomplishments are nulified.
Sorry, but you are dead wrong here. There are many photographs of the '03 flying site. There is NO catpult, just a simple guide rail. There is nothing vague about it, but you can't prove a negative. The Wrights added the catapult to the '04 Flyer because they were flying from the Dayton area which did not have the winds that Kitty Hawk did. Also, the '04 Flyer was not nearly as good, aerodynamically, as the '03.
So what you're saying is that history is a matter of public opinion? The ones with the biggest support group and fan club get to decide what's the correct version of what actually happened? I'm not trying to be facetious. That's really how your argument reads to me.
Agreed, but that does not diminish one whit their technical accomplishments in inventing the airplane. They were selfish and not very humanitarian. For those reasons they ultimately failed at exploiting their invention...but it is still their invention.
I watched the 3 or 4 shows that were on DirecTv the other night (yes, I am a man with a remote) and loved the bit on their propeller development. I don't see that the idea of the propeller as an airfoil wasn't 'inventive'.
Joel. phx
Is it un-American to profit from one's successes?
Have you seen the names come off elementary schools? America, what a country.
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