Who Invented the Airplane? A Brazilian, of Course

[JTSimon]

lol they couldn't even fly a replicate for Bush  

Trauma... Its ok Americans invented Gatorade.

In honor of the Wright Brothers, that's right, 100 years ago today, AMERICANS invented the airplane.  Stupid Americans.  Some dumb luck that was.  

By Carlos A. DeJuana

PETROPOLIS, Brazil (Reuters) - As Americans prepare to celebrate the centennial of the Wright brother's first flight, a whole country is cringing at what it believes to be a historical injustice against one of its most beloved heroes.

Ask anyone in Brazil who invented the airplane and they will say Alberto Santos-Dumont, a 5-foot-4-inch bon vivant who was as known for his aerial prowess as he was for his dandyish dress and high society life in Belle Epoque Paris.


As Paul Hoffman recounts in his Santos-Dumont biography "Wings of Madness," the eccentric Brazilian (news - web sites) was the first and only person to own a personal flying machine that could take him just about anywhere he wanted to go.


"He would keep his dirigible tied to a gas lamp post in front of his Paris apartment at the Champs-Elysees and every night he would fly to Maxim's for dinner. During the day he'd fly to go shopping, he'd fly to visit friends," Hoffman told Reuters.


An idealist who believed flight was spiritually soothing, Santos-Dumont financed his lavish lifestyle and aerial experiments in Paris with the inheritance his coffee-farming father had advanced him as a young man. Always impeccably dressed, he regularly took a gourmet lunch with him on his ballooning expeditions.


But it was on Nov. 12, 1906, when Santos-Dumont flew a kite-like contraption with boxy wings called the 14-Bis some 722 feet on the outskirts of Paris. It being the first public flight in the world, he was hailed as the inventor of the airplane all over Europe.


It was only later that the secretive Orville and Wilbur Wright proved they had beaten Santos-Dumont at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, three years earlier on Dec. 17.


But to bring up the Wright brothers with a Brazilian is bound to elicit an avalanche of arguments -- some more reasonable than others -- as to why their compatriot's flight didn't count.


"It's one of the biggest frauds in history," scoffs Wagner Diogo, a taxi driver in Rio de Janeiro, of the Wright's inaugural flight. "No one saw it, and they used a catapult to launch" the airplane.


DID IT COUNT?


Apparently, the debate comes down to how you define the first flight of an airplane.


Henrique Lins de Barros, a Brazilian physicist and Santos-Dumont expert, argues that the Wright brothers' flight did not fulfill the conditions that had been set up at the time to distinguish a true flight from a prolonged hop.


But Santos-Dumont's flight did meet the criteria, which in essence meant he took off unassisted, publicly flew a predetermined length in front of experts and then landed safely.


"If we understand what the criteria was at the end of the 19th century, the Wright brothers simply do not fill any of the prerequisites," says Lins de Barros.


Brazilians also claim that the Wrights in 1903 launched their Flyer with a catapult or at an incline, thereby disqualifying it from being a true airplane because it did not take off on its own.


Even Santos-Dumont experts like Lins de Barros concede this is wrong. But he claims that the strong, steady winds at Kitty Hawk were crucial for the Flyer's take-off, disqualifying the flight because there is no proof it could lift off on its own.


Peter Jakab, chairman of the aeronautics division at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and a Wright brothers expert, says such claims are preposterous.

   



By the time Santos-Dumont got around to his maiden flight the Wright brothers had already flown numerous times, including one in which they flew 24 miles in 40 minutes.

"Even in 1903 the airplane sustained itself in the air for nearly a minute. If it's not sustaining itself under its own power it's not going to stay up that long," Jakab says.

Even in France -- never a country too eager to agree with the U.S. point of view -- the Wrights are considered to have flown before Santos-Dumont, says Claude Carlier, the director of the French Center for the History of Aeronautics and Space.

"There's a strong nationalist issue at play here," says Marcos Villares, Santos-Dumont's great grandnephew. "Flight was a very important step in human history, in the history of technology. Every country wants to claim priority."

FATHER TIME?

But that is not to say that Santos-Dumont does not deserve recognition for his other contributions.

By rounding the Eiffel Tower in a motorized dirigible in 1901, he helped prove that air travel could be controlled and a practical means of transportation.

"Just to show that the flying machine was practical is an incredible achievement," says Hoffman, his biographer.

At his summer home in the Brazilian mountain town of Petropolis, tour guides perpetuate myths about Santos-Dumont -- such as how he invented the wristwatch.

Santos-Dumont experts deny that assertion, although they concede he was probably the first male civilian to use a watch after asking his friend Louis Cartier to make him a timepiece he could use while flying. Previously, only royalty and soldiers had used watches.

To this day, you can still buy the Santos-model Cartier watch for only a couple thousand dollars.


Santos-Dumont and the 14-bis.
You see the witnesses in the background...its not little Tommy and Betsy


The historic flight of Santos-Dumont on the 14-bis at Bagatelle.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20031209/sc_nm/people_santosdumont_dc

[Trauma-san]

LOL Please tell me you're kidding me.


First off, do a little research on the Wright Brothers, dumbass.  Their FIRST flight was in 1903, they spent the next 3 years duplicating the flight OVER AND OVER AND OVER again in a field in Ohio, and in 1905 had a plane so remarkable they could fly people around in it with them.  Also, they announced to the world in 1903 that they had done it, it wasn't secretive.

Also, the reason they had to come out in 1906 with public exhibitions was because people had already seen them flying the fucking thing in 1905 IN CIRCLES AROUND THEIR TOWN.


LOL.  Nice try.  

[JTSimon]

I didn't write that...its an article

Face it Wright brothers didn't invent the airplane...they invented a hang glider  

[Trauma-san]

DID YOU READ anything about any of this? LOL It says in the article it's bullshit, LOL.  Damn, man, grow the fuck up.  Look into the subject a little bit before you claim you're an expert.  

[Don Breezio]

lmao @ this thread

[JTSimon]

DID YOU READ anything about any of this? LOL It says in the article it's bullshit, LOL.  Damn, man, grow the fuck up.  Look into the subject a little bit before you claim you're an expert.  

Its one expert vs. another in the article the physict and the chairman of the aeronautics division at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

I never claimed I was an expert retard.

[Woodrow]

Holy shit you're stupid.

http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/aircraft/private/wright-flyer/info/info.htm

"The claim is based on disqualifying the flights made by the Wrights because 'The airplane didn't take off under its own power.' The Wrights developed a catapult system in 1904 that was used to launch their airplanes. This system was used for many years. But they didn't use a catapult in 1903 and took off from level ground. Many of their machines, including the 1905 model, could have taken off under their own power. All the Wrights needed to do was to add wheels to their craft and have reasonably-level ground for takeoffs. However, the Wrights didn't care to have their machine damaged in takeoff from soft fields, and so employed an efficient, reliable, and elegant means of launching their craft. To claim this disqualifies their craft as airplanes is taking a minor matter far too seriously. To ignore the performance of the 1903 craft is absurd.

By the way, others not only had their airplanes damaged during takeoff using wheels, some people were even killed when the plane hit a rut during takeoff. In comparison, the Wright's catapult system was, like most other features of the Wright airplane, a beautiful and efficient solution to a difficult problem."

Like it or not, The Wright brother's  discovered how to solve the problem of heavy-than-air flying, before anyone else, and that can't successfully be disputed.

Try again Dummy.

[[Stoned]Jesus H. Christ[Wheat]]

lmao @ this thread

[Don Jacob]

LMAO @ max powers the article even said the santos claim wasn't true......


man my grandpa was in the airforce and his muse is air craft.......he would laugh at you heinously and then spit in your face. the write brothers were the first......santos didn't make a qualifying flight until AFTER the brothers did. also the brazilians was MORE of a hang glider than the write brothers' LOL. god you have NO clue what you're talking about here. BUT let's say the brothers wern't the first......their flight and model is more important to aerotechnology and the industry took more from their maiden voyage than  the frenchied brazilian.

[JTSimon]

^

http://"There's a strong nationalist issue at play here," says Marcos Villares, Santos-Dumont's great grandnephew. "Flight was a very important step in human history, in the history of technology. Every country wants to claim priority."

I don't remember getting launched by a catapult on a incline the last time I was on a plane  


Why didn't the Wright Brothers have any expert witnesses to their so-called first flight beside stupid townspeople?

[Trauma-san]

^ Because they at the time were ferociously protective of the machine, and didn't want their patent to be infringed upon.  It was only after they were approved for their patents, that they showed PUBLIC examples of the plane flying.

As a matter of fact, they were so incredibly foresighted that they didn't actually patent their plane.  They patented the CONTROL system of their plane, which enabled them to control every aspect of the plane's flight while in the air.... the patent still stands today, and modern aircraft uses the same 3 principles they discovered, and patented,  100 years ago.