The irony is that, while the Wright Brothers are the only household names from the pioneering days of flight, essential contributions were made long before Kitty Hawk, and many came after them to make their planes useful.
The Work of the Wright brothers was just one link in a causal chain with beginnings preceding them by over 250 years.
ummm... no. Ofcourse, no innovation gets built on its own in modern age, you are at very least taking advantage of the fact that someone else invented wheel, fire and steel :). However Wrights had very novel contribution. If you read through history, you will see that 1900s were absolute breeding ground for new flying machines and theories. People were trying out crazy stuff like flipping bird wings. It was Wrights who figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft. They actually did this scientifically by their own wind tunnel experiments (a very first). I would say this was very original and not thought out before. In fact, if they had told this idea to someone else without demonstration they would have been laughed off. Sure, rest of innovations in aviation didn't belonged to Wrights.
* Sir George Cayley was first called the "father of the aeroplane" in 1846... Among his many achievements, his most important contributions to aeronautics include:
Conducting scientific aerodynamic experiments demonstrating drag and streamlining, movement of the centre of pressure, and the increase in lift from curving the wing surface.
* In 1871 Wenham and Browning made the first wind tunnel.
So no the Wrights didn't figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft and no it was not a first to use wind tunnel experiments.
Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted.
— Wilbur Wright [21]
In September 1909, Orville Wright was in Germany making demonstration flights at Tempelhof aerodrome. He paid a call to Lilienthal's widow and, on behalf of himself and Wilbur, paid tribute to Lilienthal for his influence on aviation and on their own initial experiments in 1899.
Incidentally - I was not really intending on pointing to Lilienthal again, there are too many others, and the design later changed because it wasn't actually the best:
> Airfoils used by the Wright Brothers closely resembled Lilienthal's
> sections: thin and highly cambered.
>It was Wrights who figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft. (sytelus, above) //
Or maybe not?
>“In his Codex on the Flight of Birds, da Vinci discusses the relationship between the centre of gravity and the centre of lifting pressure on a bird’s wing. He explains the behaviour of birds as they ascend against the wind, foreshadowing the modern concept of a stall,” says Jakab. “He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the relationship between a curved wing section and lift. He grasps the concept of air as a fluid, a foundation of the science of aerodynamics. Leonardo makes insightful observations of gliding flight by birds and the way in which they balance themselves with their wings and tail, just as the Wright brothers would do as they evolved their first aeronautical designs." (http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2016/01/leonardo-da-vinci-l...) //
The Work of the Wright brothers was just one link in a causal chain with beginnings preceding them by over 250 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Primitiv...