The Wrights were motivated by money. They wanted to get rich off of licensing their technology.

They turned out to be fantastic engineers, but not so good at making money.

They also did not attend university nor received high school diplomas. They were self driven a lot.

We have no problem with drive and interest, but I wish we had half the funding of the scammers!

Oh man, I love the A12 and its design is just amazing. It's the perfect aircraft 10/10.

I am forgiving of this defect for the reason that my attempts at aircraft in Kerbal Space Program have mostly had the same issues! There is a very, very small difference in design between an unstable plane and one with practically no pitch control at all, and the ideal configuration is found just between the two.

My understanding is that this was intentional. They thought instability was needed for their desired maneuverability. Today we see this as the wrong answer to the question of whether an airplane should be stable or unstable, but it shows how far ahead they were that nobody else even knew enough to ask that question.

This is true again for the most advanced fighter aircraft, except the active hand is now a computer.

The wings bend anyway. Watch 'em next time you fly.

The fuselage also twists and bends. This is why, in a long airliner, curtains are put in at intervals. This is because the twisting and bending is visible to the passengers in the back, and it unnerves them.

Oh, I'm convinced that if the Wrights had disappeared in a kiln explosion, the solution to powered, controlled flight would have been developed within another 5 years or so.

The canard design was the result of the Wrights being terrified of a stall like that which killed Lilienthal. And they were correct that the canard made for a quicker response to a stall. But it was also the source of pitch instability, and was eventually dropped.

Lilienthal died in 1896. The Wrights started the project by collecting every paper they could find on aeronautical engineering. The shortcomings of the existing research are evident in the fact that the Wrights still had to develop a series of prototypes, each designed to solve a particular aspect of flight. They put the solutions all together in the 1903 Flyer.

"...someone else in the world would have done it within 10 years." That is arguably true of every invention ever invented.

Echoing my other comment on patents elsewhere in the thread, Edison's innovations had big, direct and lasting impact on the world. For example, his work is responsible for creating Hollywood as a place and symbol of US film industry - specifically because he owned most of the patents critical for movie production, and was so litigious that the filmmakers decided to all literally move to the other side of the continent to be able to infringe on those patents without consequences.

Pearse certainly did not document his experiments well. But there were multiple witnesses. It appears that he achieved flight on 31th March 1903. The Wright brother's contributions to flight were obviously more significant due to their process but that alone does not mean that they were first.

Close. The 1901 glider used a rail and took off down hill. Their Flyer used skids and could take off from level ground even on sand.

If you read Anderson "A history of Aerodynamics" it disagrees on this point. It states that the Wright's didn't have a good way to calculate drag, and they didn't understand many of the side effects from real wings (like flow separation) which caused wrong measurements initially. Later on they apparently came back to something that was closer to Lilienthal's numbers, even though the problem simply wasn't fully understood at the time.

This paper has a similar conclusion: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...

"When the Wright brothers compared their results with those of Lilienthal, they found some disagreement, but not as much as they expected. As Wilbur states in his diary for October 16, 1901: "It would appear that Lilienthal is very much nearer the truth then we have heretofore been disposed to think." [Wolko, 21]. 17 The formulas were still not producing the lift and drag that were actually being produced. The only other possible source of error in these equations was the Smeaton coefficient of air pressure."

Santos Dumont was 5'4", which althogh small, not out of the real of "normal" I don't think. Jules Verne was one inch taller. He was fairly skinny too, so the weight could have been a factor. I did find a video of it, fun to see as the Demoiselle is my favorite early flyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNWPpKEZzxg

Ive read that the Wright propeller is 80% as efficient as modern light-aircraft propellers. What an amazing achievement.

I had never thought to critically consider the story of the Wright brothers until reading your earlier comment and thinking “that’s not evidence they were first.”

Sure I had been aware that patents and monopolies were involved in part from reading a book about their flying school[1] when I lived in Alabama. But I didn’t connect the follow the money importance of being first until earlier today.

And now I have gone down a bit of rabbit hole.

To me, it is clear why Santos=Dumont is worth celebrating in Brazil. Because he was the first person to fly in front of a body of independent experts, we don’t have to accept claims that align with self interest and local newspapers. It seems that the Wright brothers did not fly in public until well after Santos-Dumont had.

What really fascinates me is not who was first, but the way in which I always experienced the Wright brothers story. When I read about their flying school, it seemed odd that the planes at the school were “so old fashioned” compared to those of Europe in the 1910’s…and at the larger scale how the Wright brothers story conventionally stops in 1903.

So thanks.

[1] https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/wright-brothers-fl...

Thanks, I didn't know about that previously, although some sorting methods might be nice. It seems like quite a lot of comments are getting nominated that seem pretty...normal.

Humans sometimes write punchy lists, too, especially when they're trying to prove a point. Where do you think the LLMs learned it?

Stylometry has me pegged with a predictable style that predates AI.

Distinguished computer scientist [EDIT: engineer!], seasoned writer, and longtime HN stalwart @WalterBright? Frankly I’d be willing to imagine the AI learned what it knows from him…

I do NOT think it is AI-generated (though it might be), and that belief could be part of why you are being downvoted.

I've been watching the sentiment on AI-related comments for a while. It seems to have somewhat turned back to "if it's useful, it's okay" as long as it isn't promoted as AI.

I now think of myself as being the lucky one who gets to be at the right place and the right time, experiencing the act of creation is a gift from everything and everyone else that helped make it possible.

I always felt bad for Buzz Aldrin. He landed on the moon at the same moment Armstrong did. But Armstrong was "first".

This article says it better than I can:

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_...

Not mentioned, though, is Dumont could not turn his airplane. The Wrights could, from the first one.

The Wrights were successful and influential, yes.

But they were not the first. Unless you cherry pick criteria to disqualify everyone else.

Which is what you’re doing.

My history teacher in middle school really liked to tell us the idea of "historical determinism" whenever an individual appeared to have changed the course of history. Of course that theory doesn't place enough emphasis on individual effort or even their free will. But I guess I appreciated the alternate viewpoint.

You just lay down a foundation and keep putting layers on top of that…

It's not impossible to find of course, it's not like it's being suppressed, but if you just go through high school, and a lot of colleges depending on their general education requirements, your main history education will be very Great Person oriented.

It's not about wiping out individual achievements it's just about recognizing that no one does it alone and that some ideas were just ready to explode. Radio, Calculus, the Steam Engine, etc all had simultaneous inventions in many areas or get commonly attributed to one particular person are actually just built up to a point they can be successful through the work of dozens of people.

I'm also not saying it's 100% structural or economic just the education tends to highlight individuals instead of fully covering all the others that were just behind the person who's getting the lion's share of the credit historically.

Fits the whole pull yourself up by the bootstraps mindset. I can imagine income inequality would be less disparate if people realized how much society actually contributes.

Interesting, given Dumont performed "the first officially observed flight in Europe that was longer than 25m was performed in Paris (FRA)" in 1906.

It was also the first flight in front of a crowd, so pretty relevant to history.

Sources: https://old.fai.org/news/personalities/42650-12-november-190...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/10-milesto...

A lot of the world was hot for eugenics at the time the US in particular, a lot of the pre-Final Solution laws were systematizing things that were happening in the US on an basis ranging from ad-hoc to legal; sterilization of people with mental issues, miscegenation laws, etc.

:D thanks, you made me laugh.

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour-extras...

I mean, I'm pretty sure Eugenics was invented by Eugene, thus the name. Or it was a way to avoid needing to know people's names, because everyone would be named Eugene. :P

They never said literally everyone. It's undeniably the rule but that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions.

Even that Wikipedia page has this snippet:

  In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse, however, did not know of Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[11]: 149  for his first computer Z1, which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938.

Because every computer record has a host of qualifiers on it (like "programmable", "fully automatic").

"The Z3 was demonstrated in 1998 to be, in principle, Turing-complete. However, because it lacked conditional branching, the Z3 only meets this definition by speculatively computing all possible outcomes of a calculation."

this is the one factor that makes me question whether it should be considered first.. conditional branching is pretty significant to what we consider a computer. better informed people than myself have come up with a variety of takes on this, i read all that i see because i find Zuse fascinating but i still am not sure if its fair to call one system or the other "first".

the advent of computing podcast has some interesting well researched episodes, scroll down a little to 145 and 146: https://adventofcomputing.com/

I believe that invention was a bit controversial, for some reason...

I saw the replica of this in Berlin in the museum of technology a few months ago. Worth visiting if you are in town.

~20 years ago in school, I encountered dy/dx and y-dot with about equal frequency (and maybe y' & f'(x)) in engineering and calculus courses. Engineering favored the dots.

The fig Newton was invented first though.

Seriously though, it’s a bit of an amusing coincidence that the Leibniz biscuit and the fig Newton were both independently invented in 1891 (at least according to Wikipedia).

When will people realize that pasting markdown is a dead giveaway?

i guess the real invention for wheeled transportation is not wheels, but (flat) roads

Another potential reason it was never scaled up to carts is they didn't have access to a great draft animal candidate. Without that early carts are a lot less useful. The largest options were llamas or alpacas which are still fairly small and weak as draft animals go. The nearest option would have been buffalo in North America but they don't have great base temperaments for domesticating and they're not geographically relevant to South America even if they were.

People credit Dick Fosbury for inventing the modern high jump approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop but it was the switch from jumping onto foam pads rather than into a pile of sawdust and sand that made it possible.

This. What held up wheeled luggage was the difficulty of having small, reliable wheels that could bear a lot of weight. You could have big wheels, but that would be impractical here, though not for chariots, wheelbarrows, pushcarts, or rickshaws ... which did exist in antiquity.

I remember metal skates (steel perhaps) in the early seventies.

More importantly, prior to airline deregulation in the 1970s only the wealthy and business travelers were flying and someone else carried their bags for them. It is the middle class traveler who lugs their own bags.

did people had that much usable silk in one place back then?

You can’t little wheely luggage until it’s little wheely luggage time?

Also for rocketry the established players didn't want to majorly reduce the cost because they had government monopolies. Innovators dilemma.

The idea you are specifying is called Muntzing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing - named after a CEO who supposedly made the poorest TVs on the market, but also the cheapest. Which left him with lots of money to spend on marketing those poor-quality TVs to people who they would not work for, who had to pay for their own return shipping.

The capability of building thousands of cars per week is quite old. You may be referring to EVs, but even in that category we have BYD that is knocking competitors out the park.

It's increasingly debatable that the process actually does work.

> The tech necessary for steam engines

They had basic concepts but could not have produced a steam engine that did useful work.

The Archimedes device you mention (the aeolipile) was basically a kettle mounted on an axle that did indeed spin. But it had no way of building up pressure to the degree necessary to move something other than itself.

The Romans probably didn't have good enough materials tech to build vessels that could hold sufficient pressure to do useful work. Early steam engines could explode catastrophically and they were built by cultures that had centuries of cannon-making experience behind them. The Romans also lacked a compelling application that would have driven tech development and didn't have the iron/steel/coal industry required to build railways, etc.

It's telling that the first commercially viable steam engines were basically water pumps for getting water out of mines, and it didn't matter if they were massive and underpowered. It took another 60/70 years for the tech to improve enough to power vehicles.

FWIW, there was plenty of use for pumps earlier on - in mining. But muscle power, then water power, was sufficient.

Part of the steam engine's success was how it contributed to itself - it helped mine coal that would fuel it, and that would fuel furnaces in which steel was made, some of that steel going into... making more engines - and all of that moved around by means of steam power.

*Factorio vibes intensify*

You had to have enough pieces together: demand for coal and steel and moving them distances, sustained long enough to exhaust simple options, and become a problem the steam engine could solve. It was then that the steam engine turned this into self-reinforcing loop, and kickstarted the modern world.

"The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire"

I read here on HN that this might be not really true. Because the romans did not heavily invest into high pressure chambers, aka cannons, like it was done in medival times. You don't just need a metal pot to build a steam engine. They must be able to hold much pressure and if they don't, they explode.

So the romans likely would have been able to make it work, but it would have required a significant investment - as they did not had experience in building pressure chambers.

> The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire

So long as you don't also add the "useful" qualification. If you want useful steam engines you things that didn't exist then. The iron alloys available to the Romans didn't allow for useful steam engines. Even the first steam engines were only useful in deep coal mines (where fuel was practically free) which the Romans didn't have.

Relevant: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

> The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire

IIRC I read somewhere it depended on the previous development of firearms, as it allowed metalworking to advance enough to produce metal tubes with very smooth and regular bores, that avoid leaks, jamming and uncontrolled explosions, to be fitted with pistons. The Roman empire had no firearms.

There were 100s of Newcomen engines throughout Europe which were mostly used to pump water. They were being deployed ~50 years before Watt improved the design.

He supplied a lighting rod for negativity.

The first few launches were very difficult. A NASA project with 10 crashes would have been destroyed by the press and congress.

The superpower of Elon is to shield the technical team from the negativity, pipe it to null and post "close but no ciggar".

IMO, even more important than funding is that NASA rockets are now designed by Congressional committee. It’s hard to innovate when you’re pressured into reusing Shuttle components to keep the money flowing to specific contractors.

We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of travel time instead of months, and much larger payload fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was revealed just how dangerous the they were.

SpaceX has made a lot of real advancements while delivering real launches. You're thinking of Boeing.

>Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.

Uh, SpaceX didn't come into being until 2002. And the Space Shuttle was not in any way cheap, nor a pile of things we did with it. Nor did the US Government in any way subsidize SpaceX, anymore then it "subsidizes" paper manufacturers by... ordering paper for its printers. It contracted with SpaceX for commercial services at a fixed price, and has saved billions and billions of dollars as a result. You seem a touch confused on timelines here.

And my entire point was that whatever could have been done, it wasn't. As I said, the government absolutely could have pursued other far fundamentally better concepts at the end of Apollo. Or it could have done commercial way earlier, getting out of the launch business entirely and working to switch over to a competitive private market 30-40 years earlier. What actually happened is that without the focus and level of discipline provided by a big ambitious goal and national spirit as a guiding star, more typical political incentives crept in and rapidly distorted the space program. Which resulted in enormous waste and stagnation as well as killing a lot of incredible people for no reason.

But regardless of how it happened, again the point is that it wasn't the scientific and tech environment that created a small window of a few years where inevitably practical economic mass launch designs would come about. It still took the right vision and right spark.

> we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA

Sure we do, just watch For All Mankind :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)

A more interesting question is what could have happened if NASA had used much more of its funding on practical research (including rocketry research), instead of wasting a huge amount of it on sending people up into space for no good reason over the past 50 years.

Currently, almost half of NASAs budget is spent on manned space flight.

>Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?

Orbital is what actually provides any significant economic value. But the nature of the Rocket Equation, effects with atmosphere, and how those interact with the limits of our material science means that there is an absolutely enormous gulf between a sounding rocket and getting to orbital velocity and back again. All of that is what makes it so hard but it's also required to be of any real practical use. So the DC-X was a noteworthy historical milestone/demo and test bed but going from there to something like the Falcon 9 let alone Starship takes an tremendous amount of further innovation and engineering (and investment of course). The new engine work alone SpaceX has done is a hufe deal and is what defines the envelope for the rest of the system.

An orbital craft is moving at hypersonic speeds, which is a especially tricky when going backwards. Things moving through fluids tend to want to flip over so that the part with the highest drag is at the rear, so that drag is minimized. Meanwhile the engine bay of a rocket is not generally shaped to have low drag when pushing through the air.

I mean, both have a big role to play. You mention rocket tech, which is a perfect example of the strengths and weaknesses of public and private enterprise.

Public enterprise can be great because it enables societies to leverage huge amounts of capital (at one point, the US was spending 4% of GDP on the Apollo program each year--the equivalent of $1 Trillion/year today) to accomplish goals that are beyond the capacity of private industry at the time. It suffers from being totally divorced from the normal constraints of economy, and so tends to way overspend (4% of GDP is frankly insane) and to get stuck at local maxima (see SLS).

Private enterprise is basically the opposite. It can never match the government in terms of spending big to pull tech forward by decades--the profit margin doesn't really work that way. But it lavishly rewards the efficient allocation of capital, which (so long as there is meaningful competition) creates a drive to constantly improve tech. It's painful to think about where rocket tech would be without the recent advances born of private capital!

> By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin?

Why didn't BlueOrigin surpass SpaceX? Is it only a funding issue?

In most mathematical circles, Bolyai-Lobachevsky geometry is strictly a (family of non-Euclidian) hyperbolic geometry.

János Bolyai, not Bolshai. And certainly in the 1820s-1830s he investigated the Euclidean parallel postulate, arriving at a hyperbolic geometry in which it does not hold true (i.e., initially close parallel lines diverge), and eventually studying geometries which take no position on the parallel postulate. Lobachevsky also independently arrived at a hyperbolic geometry, and continued develop a substitute postulate for the parallel postulate.

However, all of the above is several long steps before developing differential geometry with its inner products encoding angles and distances on the tangent spaces at each point on an arbitrarily curved smooth manifold of higher dimensions, and an even longer one from the pseudo-Riemannian manifold of 3+1d General Relativity. Although many hands contributed to the positive inner product -> non-degenerate inner product, the reason anyone was doing that was because of Einstein's work on gravitation (in turn provoked in part by Poincaré's 1905 argument about Lorentz-invariance of the wave equation for gravitation, in the spirit of Special Relativity).

> My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident of birth [...] Supporting your own country even when they are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.

Would you say the same of your family?

If a family member were doing bad things, I would still love them and be loyal to them. But I would show that love by confronting them thoughtfully, not rejecting the family entirely. In that sense, our mutual family membership could hopefully become a means of calling them back to their senses, especially if multiple family members are involved in talking to them over a period of time.

> It's like football hooligans fighting over their favorite sports teams.

That take trivializes human institutions in which we are members. These institutions ought to be taken as sacred. When they fall, we fall. (Not so with a sports team losing to another team :)

> Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important?

I take it as given that (a) individual human flourishing is an important and worthy goal, (b) love (seeking the good of others) and hard work are the principal means of attaining that goal, and (c) formal human institutions (like marriage, family, and country) are the best means of organizing the human relationships and activities that fall under [b].

Given (a), (b), and (c), it follows that:

- to promote the health and flourishing of those institutions is to promote human flourishing itself

- thoughtfully managing shared values and expectations of members in those institutions promotes flourishing of the institutions

- love and preference for other members of each institution promotes the health of its members and of the institution itself

I also posit (but don't have the space/time to work out the reasoning) that just as individual people should not live for themselves only, each institution must not exist merely for its own sake, but also for the good of those outside of it; that its own internal health and cohesion is an important prerequisite for being able to effectively benefit the rest of society; and that institutions that exist solely for their own sake with zero outreach are unhealthy.

However, to say that an institution is wrong or unhealthy because members of it love each other more than people outside the institution is to deny that the institution itself is a good thing. We intuitively know that healthy married people love each other more than others, and that healthy family members love each other more than others. In a healthy company, we work for the good of our own company first, not other companies. The same principle should apply to countries. To reduce the principle to a pithy saying: "Put your own [country's] oxygen mask on first."

> National identity is a relatively recent concept

I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Every successful society since ancient history, from local tribes to the great ancient empires to modern countries had (at a minimum) social cohesion, shared values, and a shared identity. Individual members of Visigoth and Viking tribes identified as Visigoths and Vikings and had a shared sense of identity; same with Greeks, Romans, Germans, French, English, Swedish, etc. The United States at its inception and for a long time afterwards was no exception.

This doesn't mean we should be unfriendly and not care about others. Love is not a zero-sum game. Members of families that are affectionate to one another also feel very loving to people outside the family. The healthiest countries in the last 100 years were also some of the best international partners and best places to travel...

Some examples from Deep learning:

AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training convnets on GPU’s in 2009?

OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was only OpenAI training larger and larger language models.

TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman

In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1 person or group did not exist.

The bicycle. It's a surprisingly recent invention despite its simplistic material and manufacturing requirements.

Related, a good article on how a contributing factor to the founding of Hollywood as the world's movie capital was due to Thomas Edison's stranglehold on patents: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-th...

The Wright brothers have invented many components of an airplane, which made powered flight possible, but it seems inappropriate to say that they have invented an "airplane".

The idea of making an "airplane", with fixed wings and with screw propellers, had been widespread for most of the second half of the 19th century, and it had been discussed in countless publications and in "heavier-than-air" flight clubs.

However, before the Wright brothers, nobody had succeeded to build such an airplane that actually worked, the main reason being the lack of an appropriate system of aircraft controls, like that conceived by the Wright brothers.

The patent obtained by the Wright brothers, is formulated very well and of course it does not claim to have invented any new kind of flying machine, but it claims certain new and useful improvements in flying machines of the airplane kind (most of which refer to the aircraft control surfaces).

As is tradition.

I've never been taught that Ford invented the car, but instead Ford invented the mass production of cars. Not really sure where "Ford invented car" comes from

Yeah, as an American I never was taught that Ford invented cars. He invented cheap cars.

Oldsmobile invented the assembly line for cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_E._Olds#Assembly_line

He was the first to mass produce cars. But given that cars and mass production already existed it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to mass produce cars.

Exactly. Ford didn't actually invent anything. Kinda like Jobs and Woz didn't invent the IC or CPU or even PC. Ford was in tune with the innovations of the time and composed them in a novel and appealing way. His success came from his skilled execution and were more financial and social than technical in nature. Ford marketed cars to the middle class, and paid his employees well enough to buy the products they built.

Google, I suspect, would do the same, if you were in Texas coffee's origin would not get you the result that mentions Yemen, Ethiopia would be the first result. This is how I won a $100 bet with a Texan who insisted that google gave him Ethiopia. The trouble is, we were in the Middle East when asking google for the bet.

> Then the Soviets pulled ahead with capabilities in LEO, which showed they also probably had "better" ICBMs.

In the US the story is that because Soviet nukes were more crude than the US versions, which made them heavier and bulkier so the Soviets had to build their rockets bigger to have enough range. When the focus shifted to putting a man in orbit having a larger rocket to start with was an advantage and allowed the Soviets to achieve a number of firsts.

I do agree that declaring the race suddenly over with a man on the moon was a case of taking the ball and going home.

Wouldn't the 'US did a better job with probes and unmanned spaceflight' depend on when you want to plant the flag that the space race ended? If we go with what in the US we define as a man on the moon, the Soviets I believe were putting probes all over the place. The soviets were landing probes first on bodies in the 60s. While the US focused on the moon.

I guess that depends on what you define as the bounds of the space race. If we go to the fall of the Soviet Union, yea, I completely agree with your last statement. After we landed on the moon, we did start getting serious about probes and had a bunch of wins there with voyager and such.

From what I understand the US outnumbered the soviets in sheer number of missiles though. Early 1960s politicians fearmongered about soviet missile capacity in order to justify a huge expansion in military capabilities while the soviets lagged behind in raw numbers.

And they did! They both literally did.

> what we would call SWaP today

This in a new term to me. I believe it means Size, Weight, and Power. Specifically as an optimization problem. The modern version includes cost as well which was probably less of a concern with the Wright Flyer.

https://www.baesystems.com/en-us/definition/what-is-swap-c

I'm sure Taylor contributed to the design. But Taylor was hired to do it as an employee.

The Wrights contacted multiple engine makers who all refused the job.

How he could've got the Wright design when nobody in Europe have heard about the Wright experiments by the time Dumont flew his plane? Truth is, the Wright Brothers were pretty secretive about their works and it wasn't until 1908 that people in Europe knew about them.

Also, by this photo, that propeller seems to be working: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Santos_-_Nov12_1906.jpg

So, the Europeans at the time believed it was the first such achievement, but Dumont somehow was able to get hold of some propellers nobody in Europe heard about? Seems a bit far-fetched.

As I said in another comment, the Wright Brothers were pretty secretive about their works and it wasn't until 1908 that people in Europe knew about them.

And John Logie Baird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#First_public_...