If Not The Wright Brothers, Then Who?

i've been batting this idea around for a while, but have only just now decided to try and get some input on it. i know jack-shit about the history of aviation (and aviation in general, for that matter) so i'd like some second opinions on how i can make this work.

basically, i just thought it would be interesting for a different team to develop the first working flying machine around the turn of the 20th century ITTL instead of the Wright brothers, who i've decided stick to their bicycle business with later successors developing it into a motorcycle manufacturing company. unfortunately, i don't know of any other early aviators :p i'd like them to ideally be Americans (i'm kinda dividing major technological contributions by country partly for narrative reasons and i decided that the Americans get airplanes) even if they're not the ones who develop them into their full roles all by themselves
 

Driftless

Donor
Gustave Whitehead may have flown ahead of the Wrights, but the documentation supporting his claim has been heavily disputed for a hundred plus years.

The Wrights were fairly publicity shy themselves, but they were excellent self-taught aerodynamicists and they worked closely with the well respected Octave Chanute.

Samuel Langley got lot of attention with his Aerodrome, and was a media and powers-that-be favorite (Langley was the Director of the Smithsonian at the time). The Aerodrome plane need future developments to be able to fly. (Glen Curtis had to tinker a lot with it several years later - 1914! to get it to fly, mostly to provide patent protection for Langley in the face of the Wright Brothers claims) Langley was well-funded and well connected - Teddy Roosevelt was a fan...

Most likely - Albert Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian flying in France. He had the money, the expertise, and the experience.

And really jumping in the way-back machine: maybe a Alt History combination of Sir George Cayley (aeronautics) & John Stringfellow (very light weight steam powered aero-engines) could have made the first powered AND controlled heavier-than-air flight in the 1840's or 1850's. Separately, they weren't far off.
 
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TFSmith121

Banned
In the US? For HTA, Glenn Curtiss, Glen Martin, Octave Chanute,

Glenn Curtiss:

http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/museum/about.html

Glenn Martin:

http://www.mdairmuseum.org/history-research.html

Octave Chanute:

http://www.nationalaviation.org/chanute-octave/

SP Langley and Charles Manly:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/langleys-feat-and-folly-145999254/?no-ist

Outside of the US (and depending on the point of departure), either Otto Lilienthal, Clement Ader, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Louis Bleriot, Gabriel and Charles Voison, Henri Farman, maybe Leon Levavassuer...

LTA is a whole different world.

Best,
 

Driftless

Donor

Chanute is a fascinating character. He's another of the superb self-taught engineeers this country produced in the later 19th century. By the time he caught the aviation bug, he had so many engineering projects going that he maybe didn't spend as much time on practical flight as he might have for himself. He was a great collaborator with and a mentor for the Wrights and others.

A what-if is for him to be born a few years later, where he gets the aviation bug as a younger man and commits his career to flight. He might have been the guy with the Flyer in the atrium of the Smithsonian.
 
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Chanute makes for a VERY compelling idea. maybe i'll write in an "ATL brother" for him that's a few years young :)
 
Why would anyone write about something they admittedly know jack-shit about? Isn't there something you know about, that would work better?
 
Why would anyone write about something they admittedly know jack-shit about? Isn't there something you know about, that would work better?
i plan to learn more about it when i get to actually writing that part of the TL, probably find some books on aviation or else search for more direct sources somewhere on the web. getting ideas for who would be a good figure to use in place of the Wright brothers is just the starting line.
 
I'm so happy to see another Kiwi beat me to this.
Though, for full parochial NZ points, surely we should insist that he already did get into the air before the Wrights and has been unjustly robbed by history?*

I was going to write a post about it, but the missus wanted me to go out for a smoke with her and I wanted to post the link before another Kiwi beat me to it. :p
 

Driftless

Donor

Interesting info! I've always been interested in this pioneering era of flight, and most of the published histories focus on European & North American aviators. Like so many inventors, a lot of these guys were secretive about their work - in some cases, that was the nature of their personality; in other cases, they didn't want another inventor poaching their ideas. Unfortunately, that out-of-public-view approach very often prevented their achievements from being recognized.
 

Driftless

Donor
Chanute makes for a VERY compelling idea. maybe i'll write in an "ATL brother" for him that's a few years young :)

Another aspect of Chanute, is that he was not only a fine engineer with a broad scope to his skills; he appears to have been an honest, stand-up fellow who was very willing to share knowledge. Basically, a very admirable person.
 
LOTS of people were experimenting with flight at the time.

Without the Wrights, it would have been more contentious - they were a leap ahead of everyone else in terms of controlling their flight - but their method (wing twisting) was a dead end.

But ya, the people listed above are all good candidates. I'd guess Langley, Blériot, and Santos Dumont are the most likely.

Don't forget Alexander Graham Bell. He was late to the game, iOTL, but if he had pursued it earlier, he'd have been a possible.
 
Don't forget Alexander Graham Bell. He was late to the game, iOTL, but if he had pursued it earlier, he'd have been a possible.

I was going to suggest AGB. He didn't start looking at powered flight until after Kitty Hawk, but he had been playing around giant kites and gliders since the mid-1890s.
 

Driftless

Donor
LOTS of people were experimenting with flight at the time.

Without the Wrights, it would have been more contentious - they were a leap ahead of everyone else in terms of controlling their flight - but their method (wing twisting) was a dead end.

But ya, the people listed above are all good candidates. I'd guess Langley, Blériot, and Santos Dumont are the most likely.

Don't forget Alexander Graham Bell. He was late to the game, iOTL, but if he had pursued it earlier, he'd have been a possible.

As you note, the control piece is absolutely critical. Clement Ader evidently got his "Eole" off the ground in 1890, but it was basically just a hop up and down. The Wrights were effectively the first to control up-and-down, right-and-left, and banking with their wing warping technique. As DT notes - wing warping was a dead-end, as planes got bigger and sturdier and that twisting of the wing tips became an undesirable characteristic.


I was going to suggest AGB. He didn't start looking at powered flight until after Kitty Hawk, but he had been playing around giant kites and gliders since the mid-1890s.

AG Bell indeed was a generous scientist/engineer who advanced the science of flight by backing a mulitude of experimental forms.

All of these pioneers were sorting out a way through uncharted territory. Today, we look at some early designs with the benefit of a hundred plus years of 20-20 hindsight and some of the designs look pretty outlandish now. The quote attributed to Thomas Edison applies "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." And that applies across the board to Bell, Santos-Dumont, the Wrights, Glenn Curtis, Bleriot, etal

A good link to some of AGB myriad aviation experiments
 
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You know, it suddenly occurred to me that we've been missing the whole point
If Not The Wright Brothers, Then Who?
OTOH, I'm quite sure that the suggestion that Dr. Who would be the one to introduce flight would be ASB.... :):p
 
As you note, the control piece is absolutely critical. Clement Ader evidently got his "Eole" off the ground in 1890, but it was basically just a hop up and down. The Wrights were effectively the first to control up-and-down, right-and-left, and banking with their wing warping technique. As DT notes - wing warping was a dead-end, as planes got bigger and sturdier and that twisting of the wing tips became an undesirable characteristic. http://www.carnetdevol.org/Bell/aeronautical.html

There is a solution to that:

An aileron (French for 'little wing') is a hinged flight control surface usually forming part of the trailing edge of each wing of a fixed-wing aircraft. Ailerons are used in pairs to control the aircraft in roll (or movement around the aircraft's longitudinal axis), which normally results in a change in flight path due to the tilting of the lift vector. Movement around this axis is called 'rolling' or 'banking'.
The aileron was first patented by the British scientist and inventor Matthew Piers Watt Boulton in 1868, based on his 1864 paper On Aërial Locomotion.

Boulton had described and patented ailerons in 1868 and they were not used on manned aircraft until they were employed on Robert Esnault-Pelterie’s glider in 1904, although in 1871 a French military engineer, Charles Renard, built and flew an unmanned glider incorporating ailerons on each side (which he termed ‘winglets’), activated by a Boulton-style pendulum controlled single-axis autopilot device
 

Driftless

Donor
The Wrights kinda went down a rabbit hole on trying to defend their wing-warping patents and got a bit sidetracked as a result.

The aileron has proven to be a better control technology to this point. Who knows, with future materials developments, maybe wing warping reappears as a viable control form.
 
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