I always argue that the Wright Bros are the USA's greatest engineer(s).¹ Planes today still use the same design (in fact, the Flyer is even better—a twisting wing is more efficient than ailerons, but we haven't figured out how to make titanium, aluminum & carbon fiber bendy like wood (yet)).
¹–my 2nd spot goes to John Moses Browning – also, whose 120+ year designs are not only still in use, they're still in production.
I'm inclined to agree. If their wiki is true, they were just doing it out of rather pure interest with no financial backers whatsoever until later on. In fact it made it sound like other countries basically quit funding some other claimants listed in this thread because of how bad they turned out and assumed the brothers were scammers making fake claims. Until they showed up one day and flew circles in the air.
That pure drive of doing something out of sheer interest and refusal to accept failure is really inspirational. I wish I had half the drive they did!
It turns out that greedy patent licensing schemes kill the patented ideas rather than lead to innovation. Patents themselves can be worthwhile for society, but we need patent lifetimes that comport to each industries typical R&D cost recoup times, not 20+ years.
I would add in second place Skunkworks and the A12, which is the perfection of aviation technology in my opinion. It's just such an insane piece of technology, in every part you take a look at it gets more and more absurd of what's in that plane.
And if you build an airplane so absurdly advanced that 70+ years later people still think it was aliens that built it, you've set your mark in the history books.
Third place in my heart takes the Rutan Voyager [2] which essentially pushed its efficiency so hard that it coincidentally invented the design for modern delivery drones.
I am forgiving of this defect for the reason that my attempts at aircraft in Kerbal Space Program have mostly had the same issues! There is a very, very small difference in design between an unstable plane and one with practically no pitch control at all, and the ideal configuration is found just between the two.
My understanding is that this was intentional. They thought instability was needed for their desired maneuverability. Today we see this as the wrong answer to the question of whether an airplane should be stable or unstable, but it shows how far ahead they were that nobody else even knew enough to ask that question.
You can bend those materials at least once, the problem is bending them and still having the wings maintain their integrity through tens of thousands of flight hours.
The wings bend anyway. Watch 'em next time you fly.
The fuselage also twists and bends. This is why, in a long airliner, curtains are put in at intervals. This is because the twisting and bending is visible to the passengers in the back, and it unnerves them.
The Flyer was a canard design which would be considered a non-standard configuration today. And I respect the Wrights a lot, but the last book I read on them said that if they hadn't invented their aircraft, someone else in the world would have done it within 10 years. The Wrights were in touch with other experimentalists around the world like Cayley, Lilienthal and drew from their work. Also the science of fluid mechanics was way further ahead of aeronautical engineering with guys like Prandtl at Caltech (though an airplane isn't just challenged fluids problems). So stuff like the airfoil and prop optimization probably would have followed from that as well.
Oh, I'm convinced that if the Wrights had disappeared in a kiln explosion, the solution to powered, controlled flight would have been developed within another 5 years or so.
The canard design was the result of the Wrights being terrified of a stall like that which killed Lilienthal. And they were correct that the canard made for a quicker response to a stall. But it was also the source of pitch instability, and was eventually dropped.
Lilienthal died in 1896. The Wrights started the project by collecting every paper they could find on aeronautical engineering. The shortcomings of the existing research are evident in the fact that the Wrights still had to develop a series of prototypes, each designed to solve a particular aspect of flight. They put the solutions all together in the 1903 Flyer.
It is, and being aware of that is crucial in having the right perspective on inventors (and same is true about scientific discoveries). That is, they're not some superhuman geniuses so far ahead the rest of humanity, that through sheer power of their minds, they can wrestle breakthroughs from the hands of gods. No, they're just specialists who were at the right time and place, and had the right experience, to be the first to pluck an invention that was already ripe for the taking.
This isn't to diminish the value of inventors. Even as all discoveries are tiny increments on top of prior work, so tiny they quickly become apparent to many people in a given field, it still takes exceptional skills, knowledge and smarts to be the first (or one of the firsts) to make that increment. That is worthy of respect. But at the same time, inventors are not critical to inventions - if not for the inventor we know, someone else would've done the same within months or years.
> an invention that was already ripe for the taking.
Powered, controlled flight was clearly not ripe for the taking at the time the Wrights embarked on solving it. See the list of their accomplisments I posted. They had to get all of them right to solve the problem. Which is another reason why I'm not buying what the pretender defenders contend.
To expand on that a bit, the Wrights clearly needed to solve multiple basic problems in order to produce a working airplane. To do this, they first identified the problems, then conducted a directed research and development program to solve them, one by one. Having solved them, they combined the results into a working airplane.
Nobody else was doing that at the time.
Without the Wrights, individual inventors might each solve one of the problems independently, and then a later individual puts it together.
The Wright approach was itself fundamentally innovative.
Agreed. It is a flaw of the media and human psychology that we shine the spotlight disproportionately. The media is almost always a caricature of reality. Scientific journals provide a more realistic view of innovation as an incremental process without as much hype.
> Feels like you’re telling a kid Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why kill the magic?
Because lying to your kids will only cost you their trust, however letting adults believe in magic leads to them making bad decisions with tragic consequences to themselves, their families, communities and countries.
Not to mention that clarifying this can lead to increased motivation to learn and discover stuff, as kids won’t think that if they are not geniuses they shouldn’t even try to create something new.
¹–my 2nd spot goes to John Moses Browning – also, whose 120+ year designs are not only still in use, they're still in production.