¹–my 2nd spot goes to John Moses Browning – also, whose 120+ year designs are not only still in use, they're still in production.
That pure drive of doing something out of sheer interest and refusal to accept failure is really inspirational. I wish I had half the drive they did!
They turned out to be fantastic engineers, but not so good at making money.
And if you build an airplane so absurdly advanced that 70+ years later people still think it was aliens that built it, you've set your mark in the history books.
Third place in my heart takes the Rutan Voyager [2] which essentially pushed its efficiency so hard that it coincidentally invented the design for modern delivery drones.
Can't do that in Kerbal Space Program (at least not without mods), but it works fine in meatspace
The fuselage also twists and bends. This is why, in a long airliner, curtains are put in at intervals. This is because the twisting and bending is visible to the passengers in the back, and it unnerves them.
This isn't to diminish the value of inventors. Even as all discoveries are tiny increments on top of prior work, so tiny they quickly become apparent to many people in a given field, it still takes exceptional skills, knowledge and smarts to be the first (or one of the firsts) to make that increment. That is worthy of respect. But at the same time, inventors are not critical to inventions - if not for the inventor we know, someone else would've done the same within months or years.
Can you go a step further on why the right perspective here is important?
Feels like you’re telling a kid Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why kill the magic?
Because lying to your kids will only cost you their trust, however letting adults believe in magic leads to them making bad decisions with tragic consequences to themselves, their families, communities and countries.
Powered, controlled flight was clearly not ripe for the taking at the time the Wrights embarked on solving it. See the list of their accomplisments I posted. They had to get all of them right to solve the problem. Which is another reason why I'm not buying what the pretender defenders contend.
Nobody else was doing that at the time.
Without the Wrights, individual inventors might each solve one of the problems independently, and then a later individual puts it together.
The Wright approach was itself fundamentally innovative.
It's impossible to know how many people died shy of a breakthrough they were working on, that never was realised.
Who knows, maybe some materials genius choked on a pineapple two months before the breakthrough that could have given us transparent aluminium!
The canard design was the result of the Wrights being terrified of a stall like that which killed Lilienthal. And they were correct that the canard made for a quicker response to a stall. But it was also the source of pitch instability, and was eventually dropped.
Lilienthal died in 1896. The Wrights started the project by collecting every paper they could find on aeronautical engineering. The shortcomings of the existing research are evident in the fact that the Wrights still had to develop a series of prototypes, each designed to solve a particular aspect of flight. They put the solutions all together in the 1903 Flyer.