# Wright Brothers...........What if? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 1, 2003, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159 "2003-12-01T02:44:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/1 "2003-12-01T02:44:55Z")
Sure, flight has been a significant contributor to the unfolding history of the last 100 years, but upon watching a PBS program on the Wright Brothers, describing their genius and their dogged determination, I pondered … Consider the complexity of flight control. Up to the 1903 There was no aerodynamics technology upon which to draw data to provide even just encouragement. There was no demonstrable need for flight. Intuition , Imagination, Intelligence, Determination, Wealth Serendipity and Vanity were all required and met by the Wright Brothers. One can imagine that if it weren’t for Orville and Wilbur not one of us would be flying home. Yet, the total technological data base has been on a one way fast track through the 20th century, increasing exponentially. It would seem that inevitably, the knowlege of flight control would be acquired through osmosis from other engineering disciplines. Do you think that if Orville and Wilbur never existed that someone else would have come along to prove to the world that flight with control was a profitable endeavour in time for us to fly in the style that we are presently accustomed to? ---
**Author:** ![AndrewL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@AndrewL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AndrewL)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/2 "2003-12-01T02:47:04Z")
IIRC, there were several other teams around the world working on the problems of powered flight at the same time. The Wright Brothers were the first, but not by very much. If they hadn’t done it, someone else would have within a few years. ---
**Author:** ![Reeder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c6cbf5/32.png) [@Reeder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reeder)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/3 "2003-12-01T02:50:12Z")
Glenn Curtiss was breathing right down their necks. He got most of the government funding. Given more time he would have. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/4 "2003-12-01T04:02:08Z")
The problem was close to solved by others when the Wrights made their public unveiling. Curtiss is a good bet to have had the conceptual breakthrough about banked turns, Santos-Dumont is another, even Herring or another of Chanute’s proteges might have done it. If Langley had persevered even he might have. But they all had serious deficiencies in their theoretical understanding that led them all down wrong paths until the Wrights showed the right one. But even the sideslipping turns that other innovators had thought necessary can be controlled, and it’s possible that practical airplanes could have been in service even before coordinated turns were understood. But the Wrights _did_ figure it out, they _were_ first to put all the pieces together, including propeller theory - they made as significant a contribution there as in any other aspect - and in theory and experimental measurement of wing lift coefficients. The subsequent development of aircraft was based on their work much more than on anyone else’s, and they do rightly deserve the credit as “inventors of the airplane”. ---
**Author:** ![Ale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@Ale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ale)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/5 "2003-12-01T05:00:54Z")
Considering that the fisrt heavier than air machine flew in [1871](http://www.flyingmachines.org/pend.html) I´m quite confident to say that the “invention” of the airplane (man carring, full-size or whatever best descrives it to you) was just a matter of time for a light power source to appear, as the internal combustion engine. All in all I´d give Alphones Penaud more credit for the invention of the airplane than the Wright brothers, he set the bases from which they and others developed flight. Just tonight I was checking the plans for a “Planophore” flying replica; complete with some instructions by Penaud regarding how to fly the model; it´s all there, how to make it turn (increase one wing incidence), a working propeller, horizontal stabilizator for longitudinal stability and a rudder for lateral stability. Penaud succeeded to fly by 1871 with his model plane because the twisted rubber motor has a good weight to power ratio and a sound (but primitive) understanding of the theory of flight. As I said, from that August day untill Kittyhawk it was just a mater of time. ---
**Author:** ![Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapioca_Dextrin)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/6 "2003-12-01T05:27:16Z")
One of the things that the Wright brothers never receive much credit for is the invention of [left-handed threads for the left pedal of bicycles](http://www.first-to-fly.com/History/Just%20the%20Facts/wright_bicycles.htm). Our pedals don’t unscrew themselves anymore 🙂 If anyone here reads the [Forten Times](http://forteantimes.com/mag_info/this_issue.shtml), this month’s issue contains a long list of aviation pioneers. Alas, it’s not online. ---
**Author:** ![kiwiboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/35a633/32.png) [@kiwiboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kiwiboy)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/7 "2003-12-01T09:14:12Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by grienspace \* > … > > Up to the 1903 There was no aerodynamics technology upon which to draw data to provide even just encouragement. > > \*\* There were a number of glider flights prior to the Wright brothers. [Otto Lilienthal](http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal) made some 2000 flights before fatally crashing in 1896. I don’t mean to take too much away from the Wright brothers, but there were a number of people around that time who were pretty close to suceeding, including [Richard Pearse](http://chrisbrady.itgo.com/pearse/pearse.htm) . Powered flight was definitely a technology whose time had come by 1903. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 11:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/8 "2003-12-01T11:37:50Z")
At the time of his death, Lilienthal was developing a motor with the intention of mounting it to one of his gliders - had he not died man-carrying powered flight might well have started in Germany in the 1890’s rather than in the US in the 1900’s. About that link - every other source I’ve read indicated that Otto _stalled_ his glider, not that a wing had broken. So I have to question the accuracy of that a bit. BTW - stall recovery is taught starting about the first or second hour of flight training these days. Even so, they do still claim a certain number of lives each year. In his day, folks didn’t even know what a stall was, much less how to deal with one. Lilientha’s control problems had a definite infuence on the Wrights - they were aware of his work, communicated with him several times, and after his death went back to some of his calculations and experimentally verified or corrected them. I have no doubt that, had the Wrights not existed, _someone_ would have solved the powered-flight problem before 1920. Probably before 1910. As for the utility of flight - folks had been leaving the ground since the Montgolfier brothers ballon flights in the 1790’s. Aerial observation was used by both sides in the American Civil War to direct troops. Fantasies of using air transportation to travel had been written down and published prior to 1900. Clearly, folks were not only thinking about flying, they were thinking about uses for it. If some of those ideas were vague - well, heck we’re talking about people who had no idea what a practical flying machine would look like. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/9 "2003-12-01T14:44:05Z")
The tragedy of Lilienthal’s work was that he thought his results were universal, but instead depended on his particular airfoil. The Wrights, and surely others, chased a few wild geese before Wilbur realized the problem Lilienthal had died for and corrected the numbers for their own wings. They came up with a brilliantly-simple and utterly safe bicycle-mounted test stand for that purpose. Santos-Dumont had already shown that a lighter-than-air craft could be powered and steered, with his laps around the Eiffel Tower. It might also have turned out that LTA was seen as the wave of the future, if he’d pursued it further instead of exploring winged flight instead. ---
**Author:** ![MMI](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/53a042/32.png) [@MMI](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MMI)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/10 "2003-12-01T15:37:45Z")
One of the first steps the Wrights took in the quest for manned, powered flight was to basically do a literature search, collating just about everything anyone had done in the area of flight to that date (or at least everything published). This gave them a jump on the competition, but there were so many other competent pioneers that it seems likely that before too terribly long one of the others would have got there. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/11 "2003-12-02T03:11:33Z")
The main technological innovation that enabled powered flight was not an aerodynamic breakthrough, but the availability of engines of sufficient power to weight ratio. If someone had invented lightweight internal combustion engines in the 1700’s, we probably would have had powered flight half a century earlier, or at least a couple of decades earlier. Once the materials and engine were available, it was really just a race to see who could package it into a flyable machine first. The Wrights won the race, but not by much. My guess is that if the Wrights had not been around, we would be celebrating the 100th anniversary of powered flight maybe next year or 2005 at the latest. Or maybe we would have celebrated it in 1990 (see below): There were a LOT of people working on powered flight, and nearly succeeding. Consider Hiram Maxim, who built an aircraft in the late 1800’s that had elevator control, and he planned to use differential engine thrust for turning. While that would have been difficult, it might have worked - 80 years later a DC-10 manoevered all the way to a runway at Sioux City using nothing but differential thrust for turns. Note that Maxim’s aircraft and many others (including Santos-Dumont’s) had significant dihedral, so they could have been stable in roll and self-banking for turns with rudder or differential thrust. Clement Ader actually did fly a powered, heavier than air craft 185 feet in 1890, using a compressed air engine. Remember, the Wrights didn’t stake the claim to the first heavier than air flight (gliders were doing that already), or the first powered heavier than air flight (Ader beat them), but the first “Controlled, sustained flight by a heavier than air craft under its own power”. That’s quite a lot of qualifiers for a ‘first’. Some have argued that the reason the Wrights were remembered as the ‘first’ is simply because they rapidly improved their designs and grew into a large business fairly rapidly, thus cementing their place in history. If they had made that flight and then killed themselves or quit aviation, maybe they would have faded in history like Ader did. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/12 "2003-12-02T03:30:59Z")
[This site gives a good summary of the problems the Wright Bro’s tackled.](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wright/inventors.html) The gap in knowledge and techinque at the time was greatest for the control mechanism: > [@](#): > > Well, if you think about an airplane, it really requires at least three separate systems to function. You have to have wings that will lift you into the air. You have to have a propulsion system that will move the wings through the air to generate lift. And you have to have a control system, a means of balancing the airplane when it’s in the air. > > As he read the material he’d collected, Wilbur discovered that people had made wings that would lift. Otto Lilienthal had built gliders that carried him on over 2,000 flights through the air. Samuel Langley had built wings that carried his rather heavy models through the air. Wilbur assumed he could rely on those folks for his initial information on wings. He didn’t think propulsion would represent any Earth-shattering problem either. People in Dayton were building relatively lightweight internal combustion engines to power automobiles and motorcycles and whatnot, and he was confident that when the time came the propulsion would be there. Control was the one issue that had received less attention than wing design or propulsion, so that’s where he decided to focus his effort. I agree with earlier posters that it would’ve been no more than a year or two later that someone else would’ve cracked the riddle. That doesn’t make their achievement any less spectacular, though. ---
**Author:** ![myles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@myles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/myles)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/13 "2003-12-02T03:38:43Z")
This might have had the cool possibility of giving Zeppelin the edge he needed to make airships and blimps the dominant form of air transportation. Might be fun… I’ve always wished things had turned out that way, anyway. Airships just look cool, and they’re so much more luxerious and comfortable to fly on, unless you’re flying over Lakehurst, N.J. and you happen to have an Anti-Nazi saboteur on board, anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/14 "2003-12-02T03:55:17Z")
But they wouldn’t have been dominant anyway. Even if there had been a big Zeppelin industry (say, if for some reason aircraft hasn’t been invented for another 40 years), then as soon as aircraft of suitable range and safety were developed they would have immediately displaced the Zeppelin anyway. ---
**Author:** ![myles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@myles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/myles)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/15 "2003-12-02T04:20:23Z")
Not if airships were intrenched enough and people were invested in them to a great degree, never underestimate the power of inertia to overcome new ideas. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 6:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/16 "2003-12-02T06:32:47Z")
There was a lot of development work on airships up until the 1930s. They advance to the point where trans-Atlantic passenger flights became routine. The US Navy spent almost $10 building the _Akron_ and _Macon_. I don’t think a larger head start would have prevented the subsequent decline. ---
**Author:** ![DreadCthulhu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/db5fbb/32.png) [@DreadCthulhu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DreadCthulhu)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/17 "2003-12-02T07:08:08Z")
The Navy only spent $10 when building the Akron and Macon??? No wonder they fell apart during storms. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 7:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/18 "2003-12-02T07:25:28Z")
Hamsters must be getting more selective now. They ate the word “million”. I swear I typed it. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/19 "2003-12-02T11:52:07Z")
Having recently learned a bit more than I intended to about blimps and zepplins (the husband is an enthusiast - even called up Goodyear once and had a nice, long chat with some of the blimp guys there), I think the storm problem can’t be blamed entirely on the airships themselves. First of all - when was the last time you heard abou the Goodyear blimp crashing? They’ve been flying those things for decades without loss of life or major injury. Second, the _Graf Zepplin_ did more than one round-the-world trip successfully and never crashed - it was disassembled for the aluminium during WWII and converted into fighter planes. (The _Graf_ used just hydrogen for lift, too - and never caught fire. It CAN be done, just wasn’t done properly often enough) The problem was, to my mind, more a problem with weather knowledge - both a lack of understanding of how much weather airships could and could not withstand, and much less accurate weather predictions. In the 1920’s and 30’s folks would press ahead into bad weather “to get the job done” or because they were ordered to do so - these days, with a much better understanding of weather hazards, we’ll just stop flying until conditions improve. If things are getting real nasty - say, a hurricaine is on the way - aircraft may be moved out of the danger zone ahead of time, when the weather is still clear. They didn’t have observation satellites and computer models back then, frequently they didn’t know a bad storm was just over the horizon and on its way. This is in keeping with _most_ of the big airship accidents happening in bad weather. There was also a dreadful lack of comprehension that these behomoths had _weight limits_. One particular English effort barely staggered off the ground from the start and the overloading was definitely a factor in the resulting crash. If ya’ll are interested I could dig up more details. To be honest, many folks these days display a lack of understanding that aircraft have weight limits - the Aylia (sp?) crash in the Carribean being just one tragic example. Fact is, a lot of the early aircraft designs were _terrible_ by our standards. That’s why we don’t build airplanes like they used to back in 1910. They’re dangerous. My goodness, seat belts weren’t even required until sometime in the 1920’s! There were instances of people falling out of these things! Some of the re-enactors building replicas for the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ flight have been discovering that authentic replicas also carry authentic risks. No one has been killed during this replica frenzy, but some bones have been broken and at least one guy had to be pulled out of a treetop. These are not amateurs, mind you - these are guys with thousands of flight hours in many different aircraft, with extensive experience in building airplanes, who are crashing these things. No wonder the death rate in the early years was so high. The big thing about the Wrights, to my mind, is not their flight of 1903 (although that is significant) but that they _stuck with it_ and improved their design. They were the first ones to get a fully controllable machine up in the air and flying for a 1/2 hour or hour at a time, and able to do it again and again and again. They showed flight could be _repeatable_ and _reliable_, and THAT is what launched the aviation industry. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2003, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159/20 "2003-12-02T16:42:55Z")
The Goodyear and other modern blimps are much smaller than the rigid dirigibles of the Thirties, so they get less loading due to wind shear and gusts even if they get into it. They also are flexible, being balloons inside of balloons, and so can take much more wind load than the huge frameworks of the rigids. The _Graf Zeppelin_ was an exception - most of the others of that generation either got caught in storms or crashed and burned. (The Germans would rather have used helium despite its lower buoyancy than hydrogen, but the US wouldn’t sell it to them under anti-Nazi sanctions). Better weather forecasting helps, obviously, but a modern blimp crew does have the option of simply not flying that day - they’re all local hops, not scheduled long flights. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wright-brothers-what-if/216159.md?page=2)