Re: [alfa] 100 years of powered flight

[Sam Kass <samkass@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you're interested in this topic, an excellent resource is "Miracle 
At Kitty Hawk, The Letters of Wilbur & Orville Wright", edited by Fred 
C. Kelly.  It sheds a lot of light on the exact timeline of events, and 
especially who knew what when.  Since this is completely off-topic, 
I'll just say that Glenn Curtiss would likely never have gotten his 
plane off the ground in 1908 if not for correspondence with the Wright 
brothers in 1907 in which he requests and was given, for scientific 
investigation only, details on the Wright's means of control, wing 
loading, and information on their lift tables.  Glenn Curtiss then 
turned around and attempted to sell his "invention" commercially, but 
lost every patent case brought against him.  (Note that Langley might 
have been first to fly in 1902 if he had better understood wing 
loading, although without the Wright's development of coordinated 
turns, his plane probably wouldn't have been controllable outside of 
ground effect.  Also, all the patents the Wrights had were from their 
1902 glider, which was a fully functioning craft simply lacking a 
motor.)  Anyway, much of the misinformation concerning early flight was 
deliberate on the part of Curtiss and A. F. Zahm in an attempt to break 
into the lucrative market and undermine the Wright patents.  
Fortunately, the Wrights won every patent case and the information has 
been corrected in the Smithsonian archives since the 40's.
	--Sam

On Dec 6, 2003, at 1:56 PM, alfa-digest wrote:

> Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 17:43:13 -0700
> From: alfacybersite <acs@domain.elided>
> Subject: [alfa] 100 years of powered flight
> Not at all disparaging their achievements, but the Road & Track (12/03)
> article by Dennis Simanaitis which discusses some rather interesting
> legal wrangling over patients, among others, discusses the very early
> (and very important) contributions of Glenn Curtiss. It all appears 
> that
> the Wright Bros. were in fact first with achieving "pilot-controllable
> powered heavier-than-air flight", but not by a whole lot and not with
> always the best technology (i.e., wing warping).
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