The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
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The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
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Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#2The article misses a couple of foundational things the Wright Brothers accomplished:
- built one of the first wind tunnels, and published the most accurate performance data in the world:
https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html
https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/results.html
- built one of the first aero engines, and first using aluminum:
https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/onlin...
The above items are simply amazing, and shows how the Wright Brothers couldn't be denied. (You can see later "aero engines" in the Hiller Museum in San Carlos (near SF) that can't even carry their own weight.)
It's true that the brothers weren't killed while flying, but Orville was seriously injured crashing in 1908, and his passenger died from a head injury.
Source: commercially-rated pilot, study aerodynamics.
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#3> The brothers were not the first to try to build a flying machine.
They were the first to achieve controlled, powered flight.
An overlooked, but crucial, part of their achievement is they developed the first mathematical theory of propellers. It enabled designs that were 90% efficient, about double that of other experimenters.
This, of course, nearly doubled the effective horsepower of their engine.
This is a major reason why the other pretenders to first flight failed. They simply didn't have the power/weight needed to fly, and the Wrights did.
Where the Wrights goofed was in putting the elevator in front. They did this for good reason (hoping it would make it easier to recover from a stall). Unfortunately, it caused severe pitch instability making it hard to control and the Wrights were lucky to live through early flights.
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#4> The brothers were not the first to try to build a flying machine. They were the first to achieve controlled, powered flight. An overlooked, but crucial, part of their achievement is they developed the first mathematical theory of propellers. It enabled designs that were 90% efficient, about double that of other experimenters. This, of course, nearly doubled the effective horsepower of their engine. This is a major…
Yeah flying wasn't hard. Controlling it was hard.
Wright got a lot of things right.
They believed in flying skill.. that we must learn how to fly like a bird learning how to fly their whole life.
They were also lucky with no major injury (at least one of the brothers wasn't) and had some family wealth IIRC.
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#5The Wright brothers did not create from the void, they copied lots of things from other innovators, specially Otto Liliental, whom they admired a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
This is important because, for example they did not invent ailerons, but blended the wing and constant litigation from their patents block all progress in aviation in the US for a long time because they wanted to take possession of the inventions others have created(like ailerons) and became a monopoly.
Only the war and the US gobertment intervening did stop the blocking.
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#6One of the many cool things NASA did with the Ingenuity helicopter was to obtain a small patch of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flyer and tuck it under the solar panel.
So not only did the Wright Brothers achieve the first controlled powered flight on Earth, but in a real way they also took part in the first flight on Mars.
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#7Boulton and Watt would be an even older O.G. startup, with Boulton as the business founder and Watt the technical founder.
They formed their partnership on Watt's improvement over Newcomen's steam engine, used to drain water from mines. They then expanded to other applications for steam engines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulton_and_Watt
https://evrenatlasi.org/en/2019/09/who-is-james-watt-inventi...
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#8> The brothers were not the first to try to build a flying machine. They were the first to achieve controlled, powered flight. An overlooked, but crucial, part of their achievement is they developed the first mathematical theory of propellers. It enabled designs that were 90% efficient, about double that of other experimenters. This, of course, nearly doubled the effective horsepower of their engine. This is a major…
Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right, as Burt Rutan, among many others, has demonstrated [1]. As with the conventional rear stabilizer/elevator combination, part of it must either be fixed or function as if it is fixed by augmentation with centering devices such as springs or balance tabs, and the forward surface must have an angle of incidence greater than the rear one (longitudinal dihedral.)
I recall reading somewhere that most of the Wright's competitors (maybe not Lillenthal) imagined flying to be like boating, but the Wrights realized that it would require more-or-less continuous input from the pilot to stay in control. I wonder if their profession as manufacturers of bicycles predisposed them to this insight.
[1] https://www.flyingmag.com/photo-gallery/photos/awesome-airpl...
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#9Yes, the Wrights were OG startup founders, and the first such to go full Darl McBride about their technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride
I wonder if Danny McBride is any relation...
Re: The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?
#10The Wright brothers were the original patent trolls and they held up US aviation for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
They would file and stretch their patents to try and cover what others invented.