The Man Who Almost Never Succeeded (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Almost Never Succeeded (2012)

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106 pointsbrudgers15 comments

I knew that a lot of nineteenth century inventors were renaissance men but despite being a ham and adoring fan of Morse code I knew little of his story.

Did you know Alexander Graham Bell almost beat the Wright brothers to the invention of airplane? I visited his workshop, which is now a museum, in Northern Nova Scotia which has his plane hanging in the rafters.

https://www.carnetdevol.org/Bell/aeronautical.html

http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/ns/grahambell/index.aspx

Interestingly he worked with Glenn Curtiss. After the Wright's Brothers success he lost interest. Curtiss went on to start Curtiss aircraft which was a pioneering airplane company.

https://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/about-the-man-glenn-h-cu...

The difference is that Bell didn't understand aerodynamics and didn't seem to do a thing about it.

The Wright brothers, not happy with they thought they knew about aerodynamics built their own wind tunnel and proceeded to fully understand what they needed in order to achieve successful controlled flight under power.

Bell's design was nearly optimized for all forms of drag.

Poor Gustave Whitehead. Overlooked yet again... maybe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead

Reading this makes me wonder how accurate our historical records are. And then I think of this.

http://pbfcomics.com/209/

Look at the Alaskan panhandle dispute you'd think Canada (British controlled at the time) wanted to give the land to US. Roosevelt threatened to send in Marines to take it by force just because he wanted it. We did not want to give up anything but you get stuck in the middle of back-stabbing politicians and a war monger president you don't have much choice.

History is written by the victors.

And Lawrence Hargrave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Kites

Not powered, but still a significant pioneer.

That whole WP page gives a good perspective.

Richard Pearce is our contender for first flight - possibly before the Wright brothers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

Poor Franz Reichelt, also, sadly...overlooked. But he did make a great movie and left quite an impression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt

I think the huge difference between the Wright brothers and everyone before (and contemporary) to them was that they devoted a non-trivial amount of time to the testing, measurement and understanding of airfoils in their wind tunnel. Before that everyone was guessing. They produced accurate scientific data before deciding how to build their next generation aircraft. Revelations such as wing aspect ratio as a performance factor were crucial. Wing and propeller airfoil selection was also done scientifically.

NASA has a great deal of information about this.

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/wrights/results.h...

To be fair to the Wright brothers, there was a lot of competition and it was almost all terrible. Flight isn't gliding. Flight needs to be sustained, controlled, and powered. Lots of people were creating human sized gliders that were kinda sorta powered and/or kinda sorta controlled, but not quite and certainly not enough for any kind of safe or reasonable transport.

The best knowledge of aerodynamics we had back then was via Otto Lilienthal (who died experimenting with powered flight), which simply wasn't good enough. While the Wrights had many innovations, it was probably the wind tunnel they built to learn more about wing and propeller design that gave them the upper hand. Before this everyone was just guessing at what a wing should actually look like and those who guessed closely were still guessing and couldn't optimize the solution.

https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html

At the end of their 1901 wind tunnel tests, the Wright brothers had the most detailed data in the world for the design of aircraft wings. In 1902, they returned to Kitty Hawk with a new aircraft based on their new data. This aircraft performed much better than the 1901 aircraft and lead directly to the successful 1903 flyer. Results of the wind tunnel tests were also used in the design of their propellers.

This is a _fantastic_ blog for camera/lens nerds. Highly recommend, very happy to see Roger Cicala get some love here. It's like my nerd-planets aligning, HN and Lens Rentals.

If you read through the Lens Rentals archive, you'll find the absolute best (bar none) public discussion of lens build quality, imaging optics, and generally user-friendly discussion of very technical-but-practical optics issues. And it gets technical enough that there's no fluff.

Also, you'll also get the kind of war stories you only get when you see thousands of copies of lenses, abused in ways your imagination thankfully can't grasp. Required reading if you're an optics nerd. Or if optics is one flavor of your nerd (for me, it is).

I've used their service in the past, though only briefly (I think I've given Roger less than $1k total). I come for the blog and MTF charts, mostly.

Just wanted to add about the patents: his first telegraph patent was reasonably specific about the tech; but in a later one, he tried to cover every possible method of telegraphy.

Among Samuel F. Morse's accomplishments (he being the clickbaited man of the title): Imminent dangers to the free institutions of the United States through foreign immigration, and the present state of the naturalization laws. (1835)

Quite the xenophobe.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/imminent-dangers-to-the-free-...

Full text: https://www.jesus-is-lord.com/imminent_dangers.htm

Well he wasn't wrong. Its just that most of the immigrants were disenfranchised groups from the place that they might have retained allegiance with, and this was from so many places that extreme causes still became a gradient that primarily improved US diplomacy with most of the countries.

Elon Musk came to mind after reading the title.

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