Kiwi Flight Before the Wright Brothers? 336
houseofmore writes "The Toronto Star is is reporting that New Zealander Richard Pearse may have very well made several flights beginning almost nine months before the Wright Brothers ever got off the ground. It also notes that "Mad Pearse's" machine was in some ways more advanced than the first Wright Flyer."
This has been repeated time and time again... (Score:3, Interesting)
Patriotism simply gets in the way of the truth sometimes. It's an unfortunate side-effect of human nature.
its great..... (Score:2, Interesting)
One has to admire the nerve of this guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, here's a picture of the replica and a lot more info. [itgo.com]
Peter Jackson (Score:5, Interesting)
And in a few months, I get to travel to NZ again...hooray!
Cheers, Mike V.
And Otto Lilienthal flew before them all (Score:5, Interesting)
For that matter the Wrights themselves flew long before they 'flew.' In gliders rather than powered planes.
Pearse's plane seems to have been something more than a mere glider, but less than a true airplane, which the article in question seems to say Pearse himself fully realized.
What perhaps Pearse didn't realize is that the Wrights were no more 'schooled' then he was, one of the facts that led many to deny the Wrights had actually flown. I mean really, just who were these upstart bicycle mechanics from *Ohio* who claimed to have accomplished that which those who the world acknowledged as having the best engineering minds had failed at, time and again?
Unlike Pearse though, the Wrights were highly scientifc and methodical in their approach. Taking every step slowly. Testing, testing, and then testing some more. Working up the final product in careful measured steps.
The true legacy of the Wrights wasn't the first flight. Just as Tesla left little for anyone else to do other than refinement in the world of electricity, the Wrights left little for others to do in the theoretical field of subsonic aeronautics. Some of their theoretical principles were so advanced that they weren't commonly accepted as true until after WWII.
It doesn't really matter who 'flew' first. The Wrights gave us the *field* of flight.
All that having been said Pearse certainly sounds like the sort of 'loon' I could spend a happy lifetime hanging out with.
KFG
Re:For those of you too lazy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Erm, yes they had.
Do a google on
"John Stringfellow"
"Clément Ader"
"Gustav Albin Weißkopf"
All of whom flew before both Richard Pearse and the Wright brothers.
The history of why the Wright Brothers are considered to be the first is almost as interesting as the history of aviation. For instance, this sounds plausible:
Dr. Peter Jakab, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., doesn't deny that Pearse got off the ground. "But what he flew was essentially a powered glider flying into a ravine. So it wasn't a true powered flight. He's just one of many pre-Wright claimants."
But as the Smithsonian can keep hold of the Wright Flyer only as long as the Smithsonian never claim that somebody else got there first, one has to say Dr. Jakab isn't exactly impartial.
If you ask me who was first is irrelivant. It was an idea whose time had come.
So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Its the popular one that always gets the credit (Score:5, Interesting)
The credit (or lack thereof) given to the inventor or discoverer throughout history has always been to the one that speaks loudest to the commons. We all know the debate that Columbus did not "discover" America, as there were plenty of people there first.
A lesser known example but just as true is was the fight between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over who invented the telephone [about.com] (Google other resources [google.com]). In that battle, Bell filed a patent and Gray filed his caveat (intent to file a patent) the same day.
Sadly, we all too commonly think that a "single" person or firm must have invented something, while others often have inventions that predate them. It's no wonder the patent office is getting confused (although they really should try cutting down on the duplicates).
Hey, that's my neighbourhood :). (Score:4, Interesting)
A replica of his plane is on display in our local museum, sadly it's not online but it's mentioned at the bottom of this article [richardpearse.com], with the original at the Museum of Transport in Auckland (NZ's largest city, at the top of the North Island, we're in the middle of the South Island's east coast).
As the article states it's hard to verify his accomplishments, and for that reason I believe that the Wright brothers will hold their record for a while unless any stunning new evidence arises. Still, good on Pearse, one of aviation's original hackers
Re:Where is First? (Score:2, Interesting)
And if you don't think you celebrate the Chinese new year, you've obviously not spent any time in San Fransisco or Manhattan... for a start.
Re:Who's on First? (Score:2, Interesting)
New Zealander! Please pay attention.
"Here in America we also celebrate Independence Day on the 4rth of July"
(it's 4th) and at least that makes SOME kind of sense - America was a colony and gained independence, so a national holiday in celebration seems logical enough. Surely Americans don't REALLY believe the Ford Model T to be the first car? Apart from anything else, there were plenty of American cars that preceded it.
Paranoid theories (Score:4, Interesting)
But there is an important aspect of international politics here too. Being able to claim that your nation is the 'inventor' of aviation is a powerful tool of propaganda. Maybe not alone, but along with several other claims of invention, you would make your nation look intellectually superior to others. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and would probably give the inhabitants in that country greater confidence in themselves and their abilties or opportunities as inventors, thus spurring new inventions.
I perfectly understand why one would resort to this type of propaganda, but it is nevertheless still propaganda. Even if you or I don't care much what country really 'invented' aviation, somebody appearantly care enough to, if not falsify, then certainly to bend history to fit their means.
Even if in this particular case, the Wright brothers turn out to be the real 'inventors', there are plenty of other interesting examples out there (like Edison vs. Swan).
Patriotism is no excuse for ignorance
Wrights Get the Credit (Score:3, Interesting)
The Wrights developed the very first theory of propellors, and theirs was 70% efficient. Quite remarkable. The Wrights built their own engine from scratch, did not employ skilled engineers for their first airplane, and devised the first wind tunnel to test airfoil sections. The Wrights did make a survey of all available information on building airplanes, and found what little existed to be totally wrong (such as Lilienthal's data). They did what was likely the first modern R&D program (building successive prototypes, each building on the results from the previous, all targetted at powered flight). The Wrights did it all from scratch.
Why so many people say the Wrights... (Score:5, Interesting)
Pearce's flights are described as being made from a hill, landing in a spot near a creek at a lower elevation.
People had been gliding for years before the Wright's. People built much better gliders then the Wright Flyer. Glenn Curtis built a great plane very shortly after the Wrights. While the Wrights stored their plane for 4 years after the 17th Dec 1903... Trying to lock down patents on it. The fact however remains that by the majority of serious aeronautical engineers they are the birth of the age of powered flight.
Patriotism... maybe a little... but spliting hairs is much more of an apt description... I for one think that it's a valid distinction.
What is a flight? (Score:3, Interesting)
The prize he won by doing this was offered to the one who would solve the problem of autonomous flight, needed to any practical use of a plane: the ability of take-off, fly to destination, and landing, then take-off again, fly back and land again, without any external support.
More Grist for Self-Induced Paranoia (Score:4, Interesting)
No one, including the Wrights themselves, ever denied that others were competing with them. And, no one has ever denied that a few others probably managed to build some sort of powered craft that generated enough lift to get off the ground for a feew seconds. But, lift alone does not a airplane make, no more than someone who tosses an empty wooden box on the water can claim to have invented the boat. The Wrights -- who were not really the Midwestern yokels they're superficially presented as -- deserve credit for inventing sustained, controllable flight. In other words, an aircraft that could take off, go where the pilot wanted it to go, and land without crashing. No one did that before them.
(And they were clever enough to patent their work, something that is sure to draw the knee-jerk antipathy of many Slashdot readers who think the only person who doesn't own something is the person who made it in the first place.)
This kind of "Someone Beat the Wrights" story feeds the same self-induced paranoid, alienated, conspiratorial audience as do the "Moon Hoax" stories that appear here frequently.
It's okay... (Score:4, Interesting)
Reportedly, the Wright Brothers were assholes, and fought madly to keep control of their invention private. It took World War I for them to cede. Assholes, like Graham Bell and Newton. All of whom seem to have been heavy plagiarists. However, they stole for unpublished people, so it was all dandy.
Re:I'm A New Zealander... (Score:2, Interesting)