Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

This business about Alberto Santos-Dumont does put most of the thing into question:

> North Americans think the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Much of the world believes that credit belongs to Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor working in Paris.

Much of the world? It's a minority viewpoint both among scholars and lay people. Some people in the insight porn "actually, the thing they won't tell you" genre of blogs and so on also do it. Certainly it's standard in China and India, so at the least you have to put Asia on that list as well. And Wright is the standard teaching in Australia, and the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Egypt and Botswana and I'd be surprised if other places in Africa are different.

In general, when I look in my rice at a restaurant and I see a cockroach, I assume there are more cockroaches in the restaurant. So, too, I assume there are other cockroaches in this article. I don't have the time to verify the other things, but this is wrong enough that I'd rather eat elsewhere.

I grew up outside of the US and learnt that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, but I don't really care for the cockroach speech. Unless you're a defense lawyer trying to get a guilty client off by casting doubt on one of many pieces of evidence, just point out the mistake and let other people judge for themselves whether it's bad enough to ignore the rest of the article.

Haha, certainly, if you're willing to go take a Flat Earther at his word on everything but the Earth, you're welcome to. For me, a sufficiently nonsensical claim casts doubt on all relaying of source material. And I arrogate to myself the right to judge all other men. All Rights Reserved as the news media say.

The rice made by Flat Earthers is full of cockroaches. Though you do present a compelling proposition which I will entertain. For the right sum, I am willing to point out mistakes and withhold opinion - leaving that to the rest of you to have. I'll go with my rate on the usual experts platforms: for $1200/hour I will tell you when people are claiming the Earth is Flat and I will make no other judgment of their epistemics.

Gustave Whitehead was likely the first person to achieve powered flight.

AND the Wrights spent time and money to cover up that fact.

http://www.gustave-whitehead.com/

Nah, before the Internet if you asked a random German on the street, who'd they think invented the airplane I'm pretty sure you'd had gotten Otto Lilienthal as an answer. I guess the reality is that before the world got hyper connected every country had its own set of inventors for almost everything. There are numerous examples but they are hard to find now.

In the early days of Wikipedia I thought about writing a crawler that makes a table with inventor per country. It would have been an interesting experiment. Maybe it could be done with an archive even now.

I'll happily grant that claim but today it is after the Internet was invented and therefore this "much of the world believes" claim from OP is nonsense since it uses the present tense.

And in France you'd have gotten Clément Ader as reply.

Interesting that you’re getting downvoted. This passage also stuck out like a sore thumb to me – it’s like seeing some antivax stuff thrown into an otherwise serious discussion.

Dozens of credible witnesses, including several who authored sworn affidavits, claim they saw Richard Pearse achieve powered flight before the Wright brothers. Pearse is a much better option if someone wants to claim the Wright brothers were not the first.

Those claims were way, way after the fact. Like, 50+ years later. Zero documentation or contemporary evidence of ANY kind. The claim isn’t taken particularly seriously by historians.

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