Daniel Rocha <[email protected]> wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Temple_Monoplane > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pierpont_Langley > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead#1901 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozhaysky%27s_airplane (probable) > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ader_%C3%89ole > > Some of these were mythical and never flew. Others, including some not on this list such as Maxim's, flew in a sense, but they were not controlled. That is, they did not have three-axis control the way birds and airplanes do. Maxim's machine was remarkable in many ways, but it did not achieve controlled flight in the modern sense. It did get off the ground, as did Du Temple. No one denied that, least of all the Wrights. Any machine or object can be thrown into the air with enough force, and anything with wings might glide to some extent, but that is not flight.
Orville Wright later defined a successful flight in these engineering terms: "This [first] flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full f light, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started." An ordinary person unschooled in aviation science looking at flights by Du Temple, Langley and Maxim would have great difficulty distinguishing these flights from those of the Wright brothers. That is why you still find many people who claim that Langley or one these others was first. There were some good gliding experiments, especially Lilienthal. His method of control was not sufficient to allow powered flights. It was not safe. It ended up killing him. The other key difference was that the Wrights understood the physics and engineering of flight in tremendous detail. And physics in general. They measured the forces, and they understood things like center of mass, stability and so on. All previous aircraft were put together by intuition, or by people imitating birds. Even Chanute, who was the best engineer among the pre-Wright group, had little grasp of the physics. The Wrights knew a heck of a lot, as you see in Wilbur's 1901 presentation at the Western Society of Engineers: http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/inventors/i/Wrights/library/Aeronautical.html There was more hard engineering and physics in that presentation than the whole body of aviation literature preceding it. - Jed
