I’m sure someone would come up with an idea right? Maybe not.
What are your thoughts?
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The Wright Brothers didn’t invent aviation. But: The Wright Brothers managed to get the first sustained flight by a powered and controlled heavier-than-air aircraft flying. They didn’t get there on their own though. Before them came a long list of inventors and genius minds.
In China, kites and balloons have been around for over 2000 years. Leonardo Da Vinci sketched flying machines in the 1400s. Manned hot air balloon flights started in the 1700s. Airships have been around before 1900. And then we have, of course, Otto Lilienthal, who is the first person to make repeated flights with heavier-than-air gliders back in the late 1800s.
So, while the Wright Brothers have played an important role in the history of modern aviation, they didn’t invent aviation. However, I would say that their methods in innovation played an important role to eventually achieve powered flight. Their wind tunnel experiments and control systems, for example, were very important to achieve success.
Now, whether someone else would’ve figured out what they did, that’s obviously speculative. As so often in history, it’s always the “first” who are well remembered. But there were others, such as Alberto Santos-Dumont, who was also working on such airplanes and eventually succeeded. So personally, I would say, that if it wasn’t for the Wright Brothers, someone else would’ve still figured it out. They were just first.
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Of course it would - we all know Santos Dumont invented it! 😜
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Aviation just means to fly.
So you could say insects of the order Ephemeroptera, the first flying insects, were the inventor of aviation, hence aviation would still exist in birds and insects if the Wright Bros never invented it. And anyway Santos-Dumont invented it anyways.
If you are thinking about aviation invented by humans, we Chinese were experimenting with kites for thousands of years BC. In fact, some macaque tried to fly to the moon with rockets and kites tied to a chair.
I have a Brazillian teacher who got rather upset when I brought up that debate with her 😅
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I would argue that it is all but certain it would have been figured out before long, simply based on the trajectory of competitive technological progress along multiple paths that would have to intersect. The idea was widespread, the capability was only waiting for the final gaps to be filled.
Yeah, in particular a heavier-than-air object producing enough force to keep it off the ground with a small use of energy.
Descriptive essence:
an asymmetrical object turns the air.
Physical essence:
3 conservation laws intertwined:
1)mass flow rate
2)energy
3)momentum
Air momentum turns down from energy consumed asymmetrically (pressure difference) to maintain the same mass flow rate through the asymmetry of the split path (under vs over).
But this also describes how my electric fan keeps me cool.
This is a very ancient phenomenon.
(the small energy consumed, excluding parasitic drag: momentum change downwards consumes kinetic energy of forward motion)
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Dang bro’s science be sciencing
Didn’t know half that stuff, thanks👍
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Yes, definitely. Just because they got there first doesn’t mean that their weren’t other people running too. Thats like the argument “would anyone have won the race if that person hadnt been first?”
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