Incredible to think that barely ten years after bicycles were somewhat perfected as useful, Wright brothers started testing their early plane designs.

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Ekaros 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It might be that both really needed similar level of metallurgy and precision machining. After all limiting thing about aeroplanes was the power to weight ratio of engines. So more so that enablers of both were only available at that time.

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Theodores an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I hate to burst your bubble, but...

The Wright Brothers started in a bicycle workshop, as did practically every auto maker, in Europe, in the early days. The bicycle workshop was the cradle for many things.

The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe.

With the bicycle the Wright Brothers patented the left-hand thread. This is needed on a bicycle to prevent one of the pedals working its way lose over time and is how it works today.

This was 'target practice' for the Wright Brothers, their innovation was in slowing down technological progress by patenting solutions that were not entirely innovative.

Yet we have invented this story where the Wright Brothers are the heroes, and anyone that questions that might as well be communist, or whatever the slur of the times may be, 'Spanish' maybe. Please mod me down in flames for being un-American, without hesitation!

	▲	light_hue_1 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe. This just isn't true. The Wright Brothers solved fundamental problems in aviation that no one else did. The three axis control mechanism is still what every plane uses today. They literally had to invent that notion. Adverse yaw is something that every single pilot learns about and handles. They discovered the notion of stalling (literally they were the first to identify the notion and use the term) and the relationship between angle of attack and stalling. This is the sort of thing that will 100% kill you immediately when you fly, but if you know what to do it's part of routine training. And that's just the start of it. You should read "What the Wright Brothers Did and Did Not Understand About Flight Mechanics—In Modern Terms" by Fred E.C. Culick https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-the-Wright-Brothe... This has nothing to do with being American or not.