The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders? | Hacker News Reader

The Wright brothers: The O.G. startup founders?

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36 pointssaastring22 comments

The 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.

The Wrights' innovations are:

1. first mathematical propeller theory combining blade element theory with momentum theory, producing 90% efficient propellers

2. first lightweight aviation engine

3. first 3-axis control system

4. first use of wind tunnel to evaluate wing design of area, aspect ratio, airfoil section and tip shape

5. first research and development program using a series of prototypes to test each feature

6. correctly identifying that control was the primary problem

7. correctly identifying that an airplane must bank in order to turn

8. correctly identifying "adverse yaw" and the rudder as solution

> 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.

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.

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...

>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.)

You're not wrong but nobody knew this in 190x nor could it have been reliably predicted because most of our knowledge about how low pressure gasses flow over surfaces in unconstrained environments (i.e. the atmosphere) comes from aviation which didn't yet exist in 190x.

Well, you can use models and wind tunnels, which, as Walter alludes to, the Wrights, unlike many of their competitors, did. The Wright Flyer was not airworthy by modern standards, but it served their purpose, which was to validate their approach and establish precedence.

The state of aerodynamics in 190x was more advanced than I suspect you imagine, with Lanchester on the right track in thinking about vorticity. Here's an interesting article on the divide between theorists and practitioners (which the Wrights partially, but not completely, bridged - and the theorists were evidently not all communicating with each other, either), and it also mentions the flawed assumption, of flying being like boating, that I mentioned in my earlier post.

https://www.aerosociety.com/media/4846/fw-lanchester-and-the...

It also shows that Lanchester, regardless of his theoretical chops, was not a successful airplane designer! He comes across as putting too much emphasis on how he thought things should be.

> Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right

The Wrights clearly didn't. Around 1979 a Caltech scientist did a study on it, and determined that the flights of the 1903 Flyer went about as far as they could have due to the instability. At the 100th anniversary, a couple of exacting flying replicas were built, and flew about the same distance.

I'm not sure about this, but the mathematics of stability and control theory had not been invented at the time. These theories were developed alongside electronics.

However, it was still known that one puts the feathers on the back of the arrow, not the front. Just try shooting an arrow with the feathers on the front. It promptly turns around so the feathers are at the back.

As intuitively appealing as the arrow analogy is, it is misleading. In any airplane with a separate stabilizer, you have two horizontal surfaces, and in the case of a canard configuration, the larger surface is at the back. Also, in both configurations, they are producing a net upwards force (equal to the weight in unaccelerated flight.)

One 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.

Boulton 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...

Yes, 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...

The 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.

This is a disputed claim according to your wikipedia link

It is true!!. A dispute that had no basis. If they had asked reasonable royalties it would have been OK, but they refused to licence many makers - yet they failed to make their own planes in volume for related bad business reasons. Did you read where the early USAF on that era was forced to buy French a dn British planes due to the bad management by the Wrights

Yes, the Wrights were poor businessmen. That does not take away from their great success at flight. They still managed to become wealthy.

They needed to test and go further. They left 99% of the potential wealth on the table due to their greed. A proper management strategy would have led to progress and volume production. Instead the Wright patants were so difficult or expensive to licence that they were allowed to lapse = bad failure mode...

> The Wright brothers were the original patent trolls

Edison was not only a patent troll, but was besieged by other patent trolls. He spent much of his career in court defending his patents and trying to overturn others.

Do you even know what a patent troll is? Edison actually invented many items that he patented and defended against infringers (and he trod on a few others patents). Usually a patent troll has never registered a patent. He buys patent rights to any and all things he can get very cheaply, He then has all the claims assessed to see if there is a fragment that applies to any company that uses that technology - and writes a demand letter for infringement fees. They often ask for $10,000 to $25,000 and many companies who are faced with hiring lawyers and spending $500,000 in even a winning defence - choose to pay it. The trolls live on these fees. I could live well on one letter a month. The troll has low costs, a copy of Word on a computer abd a printer + postage and often send hundreds of letters a day. Read this.

https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=newegg

I used the term in the sense of the article I replied to said:

> They would file and stretch their patents to try and cover what others invented.

It's definitely what Edison did and what others tried to do to him. Nothing the Wrights did in regard to patents was new.

what is o.g. startup ?

The 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.

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