The Wright Brothers Conquered the Skies with Data
humansofdata.atlan.com>They did several things differently, from doing their own research to building wind tunnels to validate their data and eliminate guesswork.
>Sometimes the non-glamorous lab work is absolutely crucial to the success of a project. - Wilbur Wright
>Since the 18th century, engineers had been using Smeaton’s coefficient to calculate the density of air. After running over 50 simulations using their wind tunnels, the brothers determined its value to be 0.0033, and not 0.005.
>They also used the data from wind tunnels to design wings with better lift-to-drag ratio and used them to build their 1902 flying machine, which performed significantly better than their previous gliders.
The wind tunnel work was crucial to their success, arguably the single most important element. It enabled them to iterate their designs and compare them quickly. In today's language, it helped them to fail fast.
Had they been better funded, they might have committed the error of trying to iterate mostly with full-sized fliers, which would have drastically slowed down iteration.
Yes, it enabled them to not only fail fast, but to fail and live to tell the tale! Much talent and knowledge was lost in the people that died trying to fly before them.
It's also amazing to read about the many pilots who died trying to cross the Atlantic before Charles Lindbergh did it. The journey nearly cost him his life as well, and it took some time before such flights were safe enough to routinely attempt.
Early aviators had some serious guts.
> Early aviators had some serious guts.
Here, here!
On this note, I must recommend Fate is the Hunter by Ernest K. Gann. It's a terrifying and honest account of his experiences in the early days of commercial aviation (Gann's narrative starts in the '30s).
Wikipedia citation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter
> the many pilots who died trying to cross the Atlantic before Charles Lindbergh did it
I hope you're not suggesting that Lindbergh was the first. First non-stop solo flight, yes; but Alcock and Brown flew it 8 years earlier: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/bM5diyl48K/alcock
> Had they been better funded, they might have committed the error
You just described their contemporary competitor Samuel Pierpont Langley. This is great example to cite when someone complains they don’t have enough GPUs to compete with BigCos.
I’m surprised to have never heard about this before - always pictured their success as pure trial and error / persistence.
(also, I’m aware meta comments are frowned upon, but your comment would read exactly the same without the quotes, they are a bit of an eyesore on mobile and not necessary)
This was really interesting. I've always viewed the Wrights as "hobbyists" or "tinkerers" - but now I'm going to have to do some research on their lives. If the impression I got from that article is remotely accurate, they were engineers. It seems almost insulting to call them "bicycle makers".
Check out the book The Wright Brothers by David McCullough[1]. You will see that they are anything but tinkerers, but more the founders of aeronautical engineering.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1...
But don't forget that they also threatened to hold the entire aircraft industry hostage with a overly broad patent and then spent years trying to rewrite history so they got most if not all of the credit. Even their gift of their flyer to the Smithsonian came with strings attached about how the Smithsonian could frame other developments at the time.
http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_A...
I'm guessing it's a marketing pitch from the era. The "bicycle makers" narrative sells better than "two smart guys did something smart."
But by formal education they were zeros. The person on the opposite end of that spectrum would be Kelvin who deemed heavier than air flight impossible.
Fixing Smeaton’s constant was only small part of the puzzle. They discovered in wind tunnel that certain shapes produces almost 3X better lift to drag. They tried out 150 shapes varying one variable at a time to find optimal shape and angle of attack [1]. Another big problem was 3 axis control system and designing propellers that can generate enough thrust. Before Wrights, propellers were used in ships but no one really understood how the worked and their design was largely “cut and try”. Wrights needed to produce enough thrust to lift whole machine with just ~10HP engine. They literally invented theory of propellers as wings and deviced equations to compute thrust. They also designed mechanism to transfer power from engine to propellers and the fact that they need two propellers rotating in opposite directions [2].
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eb92/1d44112fbdd04532f56cb2...
[2] http://www.wrightexperience.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/161...
> However, do you know why two flight enthusiasts from Dayton, Ohio succeeded?
This just makes me think that Alberto Santos-Dumont also "invented" heavier-than-air flight, only 3 years later and it was better.
Wouldn't we still have the same flying ability if the Wrights never pursued flying?
Previous discussion on Santos-Dumont: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9542480
I can't think of any technological advance that was achieved primarily through the effort of a single individual - in retrospect, it seems "obvious" that the fundamental principles had been in place and that it "only" took someone to come along and put them together in a new way.
I'm a firearms enthusiast and have spent some time studying the development of small arms. If transported back to the late 18th Century, I could explain and document the mechanism for an automatic rifle suitable for use by infantry like an AR or AK - but I likely could not produce one, and certainly could not produce them on an industrial scale. The metallurgy simply wasn't up to the task, nor was the machinery of the day. The metallic cartridge would't even make a lot of sense; as the percussion cap hadn't yet been invented. Even a manually-operated mounted Gatling gun wouldn't be possible without it.
Once a stable, impact-sensitive explosive suitable for use as a primer was invented, everything was in place for the invention of the metallic cartridge - and that's exactly what happened. Metallic cartridges lead to breech-loading firearms, which lead to the bolt action, which in turn lead to automatic and then semi-automatic actions. Neither of the last two made much sense until the invention and adoption of smokeless powder, as traditional gunpowder leaves so much residue that it would only work for a few shots before "fouling".
All that said, there are individuals that push the state of the art forward a great deal through their contributions. John Moses Browning, for instance. He created the first gas-operated machinegun and several of his designs remain in use (essentially unchanged) by major militaries around the world more than a century later.
which in turn lead to automatic and then semi-automatic actions
Hmm, now you've got me curious. I'm not exactly a firearms history scholar, but the earliest automatic firearm I know of (not including civil war era Gatling type guns, which aren't actually automatic) is the Mannlicher 1886, which was also produced as a semi-automatic at the same time. So I was under the impression that we got fully and semi auto firearms at exactly the same time.
In the book Visions of a Flying Machine (about the Wright brothers), the author's answer to this is "definitely." If the Wrights, and Santos-Dumont had failed, someone else in the world would have come up with a practical airplane within the next year or two. There were certain enabling technologies, like more efficient motors, that made it possible. Understanding of gas dynamics in academia was very high (Ludwig Prandtl was studying supersonic flow in tubes at the time), though fluid mechanics not as much. This is apparent in how rapidly aircraft development proceeded around the world after the Wrights, and how it left the brothers behind despite their patent protection attempts.
The real key is advancement in metallurgy and engine technology made a lightweight engine feasible. The correct formula might have taken a couple years off the time frame, but no more.
As always you see farther than others by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Gustave Whitehead appears to have focused on more powerful engines. His Whitehead No. 21, which allegedly flew in 1901, had a 20 hp acetylene engine to drive the propellers. Power makes up for poor aerodynamics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead
As I understand it, the biggest innovation the Wright Brothers brought to the goal of powered flight was the understanding that the biggest hurdle was not propulsion but control.
In a nutshell, most others of the era (not counting Santos-Dumont!) were striving to get more power with an assumption that once aloft with sufficient power that flight would "just 'happen."
Meanwhile, the Wrights knew more power was coming, and instead focused on the more important truth that if the operator couldn't control the ship it didn't matter at all how much power was available, how much lift was generated or how efficient the propeller was.
To this day the three-axis controls they settled on are fundamental to all conventional aircraft. (Though the weird "twisting wing" solution for roll control couldn't scale and so the aileron mechanism was a huge improvement.)
Correct, control was their innovation. However control without enough power isn't useful. It is possible (albeit very unlikely) someone in the 1300s was able to build a controllable glider much like the wright brother's but lacking any means of propulsion it would be impractical and forgotten to history.
I'm not discounting their innovation, just stating that it depending on propulsion. Once propulsion was there it was inevitable that someone would figure out control in a few years when they realized more power wasn't enough.