The Balto/Togo theory of scientific development

A great example of this is the Sagnac Effect. In 1913, French Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and found interference bands. He thought that this disproved Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier, so 10 points for Einstein. (Note that the named credit for the effect went to the experimental physicist who found it, even with a wrong theory, rather than the theoretical physicist who worked earlier and correctly predicted it.)

For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation where fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do. But all sorts of things with scary names like "anti-Shupe winding" had to be invented and then perfected to get these fiber-optic gyros to be so good, and that was the result of many people, who probably all knew each other through the conference circuit and in meetings, sharing ideas and then improving on each other's ideas. So who gets the credit for the Fiber-Optic gyros? Sagnac? Laue? Macek and Davis? Shupe? What about Ring-Laser, which is different in engineering but also based on Sagnac interferometry?

So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even knew about. But a century later- and with the hard work of hundreds to thousands more people- the world depends on it.

In an alternate dimension, I got a Ph.D in this sort of stuff- I am truly fascinated by it. But I decided to try and be one of the engineers today rather than documenting what the engineers of the past did.

Hardly, unless the Wrights also inspired development of the Time Machine that allowed Prandtl to found the first aerodynamics research lab in 1904, or Lilienthal’s studies on the aerodynamics of stork wings, that he used to build and fly his own heavier-than-air gliders with, which the Wrights heavily relied on.

Many countries (UK, Brazil, France, etc) had similar local flying heroes that inspired advances in those countries. Your view is simply US-biased.

While we are definitely back to the core question of "Great Man or inevitable progress of history" that characterizes the entirety of this discipline, I think that there are some key differences between what the Wright's were doing and everyone else. They were very open about how Lilenthal inspired them, but he was moving down a very different direction (trying to apply power through moving the wings, rather than propellers). Octave Chanute, the French-American engineer, was a critical node through which many of these early aerodynamic engineers communicated, serving the role that modern conferences and papers hold in sharing knowledge among all the people interested in a topic- including with the Wrights. But the Wrights still hold an important position in the birth of the airplane.

In particular, the Wrights found that their 1900 and 1901 gliders did not behave the way their math said they should, they spent 1902 recalculating from scratch all of the constant values that they had based their work on. They discovered that one number, Smeaton's Coefficient, a measure of the density of air, was wrong by about 40% (their value is correct to Then, once their work was published and popularized, lots of people like Santos Dumont were inspired by them- he openly admitted that he built his first heavier-than-air flying machine based on pictures of a Wright plane. The French in particular quickly surpassed the work of the Wright's: Wright Co. was best in the world up to 1908 or so, and then got passed fast, mostly by the French, such that the US aircraft industry was far behind by the middle of World War One. Which is why English uses terms like fuselage and canard and monocoque for key parts of aeronautical engineering. The Wright Brothers were one link in a great chain connecting the first recorded stories of people flying- say, the legend of King Etana of Kish- to the modern commercial airliner. They weren't the only link, and they never claimed to be, but they were incredibly important ones. Were they irreplaceable in that chain? Well probably not. But in our actual history, their link was one of the biggest and most important.

If asked to qualify my own character, i would put myself firmly in the over adapted niche. I think society is no longer capable to integrate "characters" into institutions. A endless process of social justice, persecuting the insufferable and market forces promoting finacial gaming of systems see to that.

If you want to find out what i mean, take some biographs of break through characters and find out, when today there ability to inflict change would actually end.

Would they be kicked out of school, university, the first job. Somebody as charismatic as feynman, would be a scandalous figure in todays scientific community.

What is your explenation for the great stagnation? We have 8 billion people, 3 billion of whom could engage, even if just in there spare time (as many researchers did and started out in the past) in science. Break-Throughs and Future shock should be hammering down on the hour every hour.

Instead we have todays society, with a world in crisis falling back to historic means (coal powered energy) to keep a untenable situation stable a little longer. Its really hard, to see todays institutions & companys not as utter failures in regards to enabling progress, yes even roadblocks to it.