The Wrights were the first to fly a controllable, heavier than air craft. Controllable is the big word there. The 1903 Flyer had canard stabilators, rudders, and wing warping for roll control. Most others either attempted to make the aircraft perfectly stable, or used some incorrect notions on weight shift.
And they barely got it done; the Flyer required what pilots would call negative density altitude to fly. They flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (a barrier island a few feet above sea level) in December.
The engine was astonishingly terrible. IIRC it displaced something like 2 liters via 4 cylinders, but made a whopping 12 horsepower. It didn’t have a carburetor; a small pan of gasoline sat over an open flame to boil the gasoline to provide vapor. Mankind flew the very second we had a barely sufficient power plant.
They then went on to do dick all. It’s my understanding that at least one of the brothers was very concerned about IP theft, so they were very selective on who they sold planes to, who they hired and worked with etc. They had a monopoly on aircraft and basically did nothing with it. Glen Curtis wanted in, he wanted to develop aircraft with the Wright brothers, they told him to pound sand, he looked at their patent, the main thing it protected was the Wright wing warping system, to get around that, Glen Curtis invented the aileron. They did end up merging and they kind of puttered out of existence shortly after WWII when large radial engines fell out of favor.
The Wrights were the first to fly a controllable, heavier than air craft. Controllable is the big word there. The 1903 Flyer had canard stabilators, rudders, and wing warping for roll control. Most others either attempted to make the aircraft perfectly stable, or used some incorrect notions on weight shift.
And they barely got it done; the Flyer required what pilots would call negative density altitude to fly. They flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (a barrier island a few feet above sea level) in December.
The engine was astonishingly terrible. IIRC it displaced something like 2 liters via 4 cylinders, but made a whopping 12 horsepower. It didn’t have a carburetor; a small pan of gasoline sat over an open flame to boil the gasoline to provide vapor. Mankind flew the very second we had a barely sufficient power plant.
They then went on to do dick all. It’s my understanding that at least one of the brothers was very concerned about IP theft, so they were very selective on who they sold planes to, who they hired and worked with etc. They had a monopoly on aircraft and basically did nothing with it. Glen Curtis wanted in, he wanted to develop aircraft with the Wright brothers, they told him to pound sand, he looked at their patent, the main thing it protected was the Wright wing warping system, to get around that, Glen Curtis invented the aileron. They did end up merging and they kind of puttered out of existence shortly after WWII when large radial engines fell out of favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
TL;DR: The difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.