Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every one of them went against conventional wisdom and the laws of physics as they were known or suspected to be at the time. This is not true of the Wrights. Their first step was to gather together all the known aeronautical knowledge at the time. They relied on them, too, until they discovered the coefficient of lift was off by a factor of two. Then they built their own wind tunnel to determine the correct value.…
Correcting knowing knowledge always comes with the chance that what you're observing may be invalid for reasons you aren't considering. So in this regard you're largely agreeing with the post you're ostensibly arguing against. Everybody else says e.g. the coefficient of lift is x, I say it's y - is not just a "discovery", but going against the conventional knowledge of laws of physics of a given time. It's not like t…
They set up experiments to prove the existing theory was wrong. That is completely counter to what you write. Nobody else did that.
> It's not like the aviation enthusiasts prior to the Wright Bros were just strapping aluminum sheeting to their backs and jumping off cliffs. Well I mean maybe somebody somewhere at some time did do that, but for the most part people always try to start from a basis of what's known, and work their way up from toy experiments.
That's pretty much what the Wright's contemporaries were doing. Trying random things in a disorganized manner with eyeballed designs. It's very, very different from the Wrights who:
1. researched all available material
2. identified the fundamental problems that must be solved
3. developed prototypes to solve each problem
4. put the results into a new design that worked
Nobody else was doing that. And that's why the Wrights succeeded, and the others failed miserably. Later, when the Wrights took their Flyer to Europe, they astonished the European aviators by literally flying circles around them. (European designs could not turn.)