Happy Saturday. Today is the anniversary of the Wright brothers first controlled, powered sustained flight, which took place on the outer banks of North Carolina in three So Today's Saturday classic is our episode five, First Flight, which talks about the Wright brothers first flight, as well as the flights of four other aviators. Near the beginning of this episode, we note that the people were talking about it in it are all men, but that we have a whole section of our website devoted to women in aviation. Sadly, the format of our website totally changed a few years ago. We no longer have that round up page, but we do still have all those episodes and they include people like Jackie Cochrane, Harriet Quimby, Bessie Coleman, Beryl Markham, Lillian Bland, the Night Witches, and the women Air Force Service pilots. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class production of My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray cy Vee Wilson and I'm Holly fry So, Holly, you and I have been hosts of the show for a little over four years. Now is that all actually? Now that I think about it. Some patterns have emerged in the comments that we get when we share stories on particular topics over those UH coming up on five years, like mentioning Paul Revere prompts comments about Sybil Lettington, who we talked about in Six More Impossible episodes. UH posts about George Gordon lord Byron usually get replies about his daughter Ada Lovelace, who has also been the subject of a past episode. UM. Anytime we post anything about the Right Brothers, we get lots of comments about other people who are not at the Right Brothers who we should be talking about. Yeah, various levels from hey did you know about too? You're horrible and you ignored these important people. Right. So one reason for all these Right Brothers comments is that the Right Brothers First has a lot of qualifiers on it. People flew in balloons well before the Rights took to the air in a plane. There were a lot of gliders before them, as well as including ones that they designed while they were working toward powered flight. Powered dirigibles also predate powered airplanes, and there were also a lot of heavier than airplanes that managed to get up off the ground, but not necessarily in a way that you could describe as flying falling with style. Right. So when people say that the Right Brothers were first in quotation marks, uh, there's a series of very particular circumstances we're talking about. We're talking about an aircraft heavier than air that achieved a sustained and controlled and self powered flight with a person on board. All that stuff together, and really a lot of these distinctions are kind of arbitrary. There's also some legitimate conversation to be had about just how controlled the White Wright brothers first flights really were. Uh, there was some careening involved in some cases. So we're gonna talk about all of that today and some of the other folks who come up pretty often as people who maybe should be considered to have flown before the Right Brothers. And we're going to say right from the beginning that all the men that we're talking about today, we're all really remarkable in their own way, regardless of whether we get to say first before their achievement. And we also want to know that even though the people that we're talking about today are all men, we have a whole women in Aviation tag on our website that has lots of groundbreaking female aviators as well. We're not leaving them out, but we're gonna art just as a level set with the Right Brothers. So even among people who agree that they were first, there is still something to disagree on, and that's whether Ohio, where the Right Brothers were from, or North Carolina, where they refined their glider designs and took their first powered flight, should get most of the credit. Whether this interstate disagreement is good natured or not really depends on who you ask. And both states have references to flight, and the Right Brothers flyer on their license plates and their state quarters. So the Right Brothers started experimenting with flight in the late eighteen nineties. Wilbert wrote to the Smithsonian and to ask for all the prior research that they had on it, saying that he was quote an enthusiast but not a crank overall, though you know, aside from talking to the Smithsonian and whatnot, they were comparatively quiet about what they were doing. Other innovators, including Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian. We're making very public attempts at flight, and it was actually Langley that the Smithsonian first supported as being able to claim first flight status. The Right Brothers, on the other hand, were tinkering, refining, and learning from their mistakes, all without a lot of fanfare. This would become doubly true after their first successful flight, at which point they became very secretive, especially once they were embroiled in a patent or over their flight control system. So the Right Brothers shows the outer banks of North Carolina as their testing ground because the constant wind helped with the lift. They first refined the gliders that they were working on until they were satisfied with their aerodynamics, and then they turned their attention to power, developing a lightweight gasoline engine UH and a propeller. The end result was the six five pound eleven point eight one horsepower Flyer, which they tried to use for a powered controlled flight with a person on board on December fourteenth, three. This attempt at kill Devil Hills with Wilbur flying did not go well UH. Other than creating a wheeled undercarriage. They launched the flyer from a wooden rail, which it traveled down on a wheeled dolly on December fourteenth. Wilbur climbed too sharply after leaving that rail, and the flyers stalled and crashed. They had it repaired in time for another attempt on December three, and at about ten thirty five in the morning, Orville made a brief and as we noted at the top of the show, somewhat careening hundred and twenty ft or thirty six meter flight stayed aloft for about twelve seconds. They had set up a camera ahead of time, and John T. Daniels activated the shutter to take the now famous picture of the flyer aloft with Wilbur running alongside of it. They tried three more times that day, taking turns, with their best attempt being there last of the afternoon. Wilbur flew eight hundred fifty nine feet that's about two hundred and sixty two ms in just under a minute. Then the flyer pitched and, in Orville's words quote, darted into the ground. They sent their father a telegram that night to tell him the news. Unfortunately, back in their base camp, a gust of wind flipped the flyer over and wrecked it, and at that point it was too badly damaged to be easily repaired, so that put a temporary into their attempts at flight. The Rights kept refining and improving their designs from there, testing and making adjustments as they went. On October five, n five, they flew thirty eight kilometers near Dayton, Ohio in the right flyer three. This was its own type of first a flight measured in kilometers instead of meters was a feat at the time. Next we are going to talk about perhaps the rights most fanciful challengers was self taught French engineer and aviator at Claimant Adair. He was born on February four, eight forty one, and like a lot of the other early aviators, he got his start with ballooning. He made his first heavier than aircraft in eighteen seventy three, which was hold on a tether kind of like a kite. He also studied birds and bats, and they would go on to influence his aircraft designs. Adair's first powered aircraft was a monoplane that he named Aol after al of Greek mythology, and he was granted a patent for it on August eleven. On October nine, eighteen ninety, it left the ground and moved about a hundred and sixty five feet that's about fifty meters. But this wasn't really so much a flight as it was a hop he'd successfully made a vessel that could go in the air and come back down, but it couldn't stay in the air in any sort of meaningful way. There claimed he made another more successful attempt in September of the following year, although historians generally doubt that that one actually happened. In eight two, a Day was granted a subsidy from the French Minister of War to work on another aircraft. The result, after a couple of iterations, was the Avian three, an another monoplane with twin twenty horsepower steam engines with foot pedals to control the rudder, the rear wheels, and the speed of the propellers. There was also a crank that could change the positioning of the wings. This aircraft never really made it off the ground. On October twel it traveled around a circular track in Satsori, France, but it never really lifted off. It did briefly come off the track during a test on October four, but it didn't remain airborne. This was you could imagine as like if something hit a hit a bump and sort of leapt up in the air. It was that level of yeah, because this project was being funded by the Ministry of War. The government had a representative witnessing these tests, and that general's assessment that witnessed them was that though the Avon three had not successfully flown, those tests should continue. The Ministry of War disagreed and it cut its losses at sixty thousand francs. The avance he eventually made its way to Muse desal Emitier in Paris, but in nineteen o six, out Berto Santos Dumont, who you're going to talk about next, made Europe's first public airplane flight. So claiment and air was really frustrated that he had not gotten here first, and he started claiming that he had made a successful flight aboard the Avian three, having gone at least three or ninety meters during those October fourteenth tests. He offered no substantiation for this claim, though, and it directly contradicted what the general had reported. Flight historians generally agree that this is a fabrication, trying to get in on that um that's sweet, sweet first money. Of all the aircraft that we're talking about today, Adairs looked the least like a conventional airplane. He fashioned his with wings pattern after a bat and the avy On three's propeller blades looked like feathers. It looks like if a tiny race of forest creatures in a video game tried to make an airplane, which to me sounds delightful and I wish they all looked that way. It is pretty delightful. There will be a picture of it as part of the art for this on our website. So it doesn't appear that he ever actually made a successful sustained flight, but he did succeed and innovated in other areas, including in telephone technology. He gave a demonstration of his stereo telephone device at Paris Exposition of Electricity and he earned a patent for it. Later that same year. Adair died into Lose a March fifth n So next we are going to get to another, uh, pretty fascinating character. That is Alberto Santos Dumont. We're going to talk about that after a break. Unlike Claiman Adair, who, as we said earlier, was self taught, Alberto Santos Dumont was formally try in physics and mechanics, as well as in chemistry and an astronomy. He was born in Brazil on July seventy three, and he was the son of a wealthy coffee planter. When he was eighteen, he went to Paris to study. He was twenty five when he started experimenting with ballooning, making his first ascent in Paris on July four in a balloon he had named Brazil, and he quickly started trying to figure out how to build a practical balloon that could be steered so. At that point, as you may recall from our numerous episodes on balloon ing, most balloons could change altitudes, but they were really at the mercy of the wind when it came to the direction of their travel. Figuring out how to make a reliably steerable balloon required him to rethink basically everything from the shape of the balloon itself, to the materials it was made up, to the system used to steer, to the engine used to drive it. He wound up designing his own three point five horsepower gasoline powered internal combustion in that being one that was safe enough to use an hydrogen filled bag of gas, which at the time was quite a feat like making an internal combustion engine that was was safe enough and reliable enough to not set that bag of gas on fire. Was a big deal, and the Santos Dumont number one, his first attempt at a steered balloon, ascended on September eighteenth. He tinkered with the design and the Santos Dumont number three ascended on November eighteen ninety. He was able to steer it around the Eiffel Tower several times before landing. On October nineteenth, nineteen o one, the Santos Dumont number six took off from Saint Cloud, circled the Eiffel Tower and returned, and under thirty minutes was earned the Aero Club of France's Deutsch Prize, which had been announced more than a year before in an effort to inspire aeronautical innovation. This prize, which I mean this was an accomplishment for sure. They basically this prize at a hundred thousand francs, which they did because they didn't think it was actually possible that anybody would pull it off. So he won that prize and distributed a quarter of it to his crew and then gave the rest of it to the Parisian poor. And at first they actually tried to deny him the prize because it took a minute in twenty five seconds to secure the aircraft at the finish line, putting the trek just over that thirty minute mark. He offered to do the whole thing over again, and the judging committee ultimately reversed their decision. So this was the first really effective demonstration of a practical airship. Previous attempts at airships had been a lot more limited than this design. But after this success, Santos S. Dumont decided that dirigibles were way too influenced by weather condition to ever by weather conditions to ever become a truly workable method of transportation. So he turned his attention to heavier than airplanes. So back in Brazil he did the fourteen bees or if you're looking at its fourteen dash b I s and that's a boxy looking biplane with a twenty four horsepower motor. It looked boxy because it was designed from box kites, and unlike the Wright brothers who used a wooden launching rail to become airborne, he wanted to make an aircraft that could take off under its own means. His first attempt to do so, in July of nineteen o six failed. Another attempt on September seven barely left the ground, and then a few days later he made it a meter off the ground. And every time he would sort of address the problems that came up. Whatever he discovered that seemed like it was preventing him from reaching its successful flight, he would refine the design and then he would try again. On October twenty three, nineteen o six, the fourteen Bees took off, traveled about sixty meters at about three ft in the air, and then landed. A flight on November twelve, nineteen o six, flew two and twenty. Both of these were obviously after the December seventeen three Right Brothers flight, and he was in fact inspired by that success. The reason that people point to Alberto Santos Dumont over the Right Brothers is that this whole distinction of the wheeled undercarriage on the fourteen Beasts versus the wooden launching rail that the Right flyer was using. The argument is that the Rights flyer doesn't count because the plane relied on separate pieces to take off rather than an integrated set of wheels that were actually part of the aircraft. They're also some very passionate Santos Dumont supporters who argue that the rights didn't fly in three at all, suggesting that all their secrecy was really a cover up, and that there continued use of a launching rail was evidence that they had never really perfected their earlier designs. So I don't know if I would go so far as to say that's accurate, But in terms of this was a self contained aircraft that took off an or its own power rather than using a launching rail I got in my opinion is that actually has some merit. Yeah. Santos Dumont didn't stop with the fourteen Bees. He went on to design the Demoisille or Dragonfly, a practical light aircraft, and he published the plans for anyone to use to build their own. But in nineteen ten he was seriously hurt in a plane crash, and that led to him having a number of ongoing physical issues and it kept him from ever flying again. He had also genuinely, passionately loved flight, and he was terribly dismayed at the growing use of aircraft in warfare, and he was especially upset by because he felt like he was personally responsible. There had been so many developments and aviation that were either his or that built off of work that he had done, and in addition to the lingering effects of the nineteen ten crash, he also became seriously ill. He died by suicide on July twenty thirty two. In addition to the aviation awards he earned during his lifetime, he was a charismatic showman who became something of a celebrity. Contemporary accounts also describe him as flamboyant and somewhat feminine, and there's been some speculation about what his sexual orientation might have been. Today, he is still a highly revered figure in Brazil, known as the father of the Brazilian Air Force. Multiple roads and schools, as well as the town he was born in, have been named after him. Now we will move on to Richard Pierce, who, for our first year or so on the show was the person most often mentioned when we brought up the Right Brothers. He was a New Zealand aviation pioneer born on December three, eight seventy seven. He was a mostly self taught inventor and farmer, and he was granted his first patent in nineteen o two for a new style of bicycle that used pedals that you pushed up and down rather than in a circle. He invented a lot of other devices to including a potato planter and a needle threader. Thinking about what it would be like to ride a bike where you had to push the pedals up and down. It's kind of like a StairMaster bike. That seems sort of mean, but probably not. He was also working on ideas for powered flight. His first airplane design was a low profile monoplane made of bamboo wire, canvas and steel tubing. On his first attempt to fly it, he took off from the road adjacent to his farm on the South Island. He flew fifty yards or so and then he crashed into a gorse fence. So there were some witnesses to this flight. It definitely happened, but the details aren't recorded in any kind of official account, so there has been a whole lot of debate about exactly when this flight happened. Pierce was a bit of a loner. He never married, there weren't really people that he talked to day to day about his work, and he also didn't keep a lot of written records or notes. Then most cases, when it comes to things that he worked on. Patent applications are the only maaning documentation of what he was doing, and this is also why we have way less to share about his process than most of the other aviators were talking about today. Much later, in nineteen fifteen and nineteen eighteen, he wrote two different letters in which he remembered the flying having happened in February or March of nineteen o four. Researchers reconstructed various bits of eyewitness testimony to arrive at a date of March thirty one, nineteen o three, although some have also argued that it was actually in nineteen o two. And this is why for the first year or so after we joined the show, he was the person so often cited as a counter argument to the Right brothers. However, in fourteen, while doing while doing research for a book on Pierce aviation, historian Errol Martin found an old article published in the Timoroo Post on November seventeenth of nineteen o nine, and in this article, Pierce himself contractor x the idea that he was flying anywhere close to the time that the Wright brothers did. As he said to the reporter quote, I did not attempt anything practical with the idea until in nineteen o four the St. Louis Exposition authorities offered a prize of twenty thousand dollars to the men to the man who invented and flew a flying machine over a specified course. I did not, as you know, succeed in winning the prize. Neither did anybody. He went on to describe some tests of the machine that he was currently working on, a comparatively lightweight craft powered by a twenty five horsepower engine that he had designed himself, along with the rest of the planes components. Even the tests that he described to this reporter were more like hops than true sustained flight, and Errol Martin suspected that the reason that the nineteen o two or nineteen o three date persisted for as long as it did was because people were looking for substantiation that that flight occurred somewhere around that time, not six or seven years later. Pierce himself also said that he didn't fly before the Right brothers, and that he became motivated to work on his own aircraft after their successes. So the counter argument that we've heard most often in response to Richard Pierce saying that he had not beaten the right brothers was that he was just being nice. He may have been lovely, he may have just been being nice. But like, that's not a very substantive counter argument, right, uh. And Pierce died in christ Church on July. Most of the other men we've talked about today wound up influencing the greater field of aviation in some way, regardless of whether their attempts at controlled powered flight were really all that successful. And this was less true for Richard Pierce, but it was only because being in New Zealand put him really far away from where most of that work was happening. His plane, though, was pretty sophisticated for the time. It had wing flaps, a rear elevator and a wheeled steerable undercarriage and a propeller with variable pitch blades. Because he was so physically removed for most of the other people physically doing this work, though not a lot of people who were trying to come up with workable aircraft actually saw it or got to learn from it. Yeah, it makes you wonder if he were closer to those people, if his innovations wouldn't have accelerated the development of flight in a very serious way, and for a time after his death, Pierce's work was nearly forgotten. Fortunately, knowledge of his efforts did survive. An auctioneer offered his last plane to the Canterbury Aero Club, and aviation engineer George Bolt later bought it and donated it to the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, where a replica is now part of their collection. Although it seems unlikely that Pierce achieved true sustained flight in his aircraft, modern replicas word with ultralight aircraft engines has been capable of flight. So we're going to take one more quick sponsor break before we talk about our last first flight, which was by Gustav Whitehead. So in a weird little irony, Gustav Whitehead is not the name who is most often tossed out when we mentioned the right brothers, but he is the aviation pioneer who has gotten a lot of the most first in flight attention in recent years, particularly in the United States. He was born on January one, eighteen seventy four, and immigrated to the United States from Bavaria. He settled in Connecticut and changed his surname to Whitehead. From Viskoff. The idea that Whitehead might have flown first has come up periodically since the nineteen teens, and the most recent big wave of attention came inten and that's when editor Paul Jackson endorsed the idea that the credit should go to Whitehead in the centennial edition of Jane's All the World's Aircraft. Australian John Brown launched the website Gustav dash whitehead dot com that same year, laying out various pieces of evidence that Whitehead was the first to fly, including what's purportedly a piece of photographic evidence. So here are the claims. On August eighth, n O one, the Bridgeports Sunday Harold reported that Whitehead had made a half mile flight four days before on August fourteen, aboard a very bird like monoplane known as Number twenty one, and as still happens today, other publications picked up this story and mirrored it in their own pages without doing any additional reporting of their own on it. This report listed to ben as having helped Whitehead in this effort, and those were James Dickey and Andrew Seeley. In an article in American Inventor published April first nineteen o two, Whitehead himself also claimed to have flown for several miles over Long Island on January seventeenth of that year. He claimed that flight and another shorter one took place on the same day. From there, Whitehead made a failed bid to enter an aircraft in the aeronautical competition at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in nineteen o four. That was the same one that Richard Pierce referenced in his nineteen o nine newspaper interview. Whitehead built several other aircraft between nineteen o six and nineteen o nine, none of which, ever, apparently flew. When a Scientific American reporter visited him in nineteen o three, he was actually working on a glider and not on a powered aircraft. There were doubts about his claims even at the time. A much different article appeared in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer in nineteen o two, titled Unrealized Dreams Last Flop of the Whitehead Flying Machine. It detailed the various grapes of Whitehead's financial backer, Herman Lindy, who had invested six thousand dollars in two machines and was disappointed in the fact that neither of them could actually fly. The Bridgeport Post published a similar critical article on the same day. Whitehead died on October tenth, and then in the nineteen thirties, somebody stumbled over that initial article that had reported that he had a successful flight, so people started trying to track down confirmation of whether he had flown or not. Andrew Seely could not be located when he wasn't listed in any local directories. They did, however, find James Dickey, who not only said he had not witnessed the flight, but also said he was not even there. He did not know any Andrew Seeley, and he had never even heard of any flight and that or any other Whitehead aircraft. When an interviewer tracked him down in nineteen thirty six, he said, quote, I believe the entire story of the Herald was imaginary and grew out of the comments white had discussing what he hoped to get from his plane. It's also impossible to go back and review Whitehead's notes and schematics to try to replicate his aircraft and see if it actually worked, because he didn't leave any A few photographs do exist of his nineteen o one machine, although all of those show it on the ground and not in the air. No photograph is known to exist in the machine that purportedly flew several miles in nineteen o two, and no photographs exist of one of his aircraft in flight. There are photos of an unpowered glider as well as one that was flown without a person aboard. This new in quotation Mark's photo evidence that was alluded to is a really heavily enlarged detail of an exhibition that was shown at the Aero Club of America in January nineteen o six. This vastly zoomed in on picture shows a white blob shaped roughly like one of Whitehead's airplanes when viewed from above. People looking to support Whitehead's claims did interview a number of witnesses between nineteen thirty four and nineteen seventy four. However, their statements contradict one another or they're demonstrably false, and at least one of them was paid to give that story. All of those statements were documented at least thirty years after the flight purportedly took place, and meanwhile, his family, employers, financial backers, and other people who were working in the field of aeronautics at the time generally agree that none of his planes ever left the ground. Yeah, accurately reconstructing exactly when something happened thirty years or more after it happened, when there's not anything actually written down about it to jog your memory. That's kind of a tall order. So in the Smithsonian published a number of lengthy rebuttals of all the various Whitehead evidence, and then Scientific American did as well, refuting Whitehead supporters use of its own past reporting is support for their claims. So people, basically we're pointing to old Scientific American articles being like, well, right there, it says that he flew, and then Scientific American was like, actually, that's not what it says. Supporters often claim that the only reason that the Smithsonian won't seriously consider the possibility of Whitehead beating the Right Brothers Too Powered flight is that the contract they signed for the flyer specifies that they won't display a challenge to the Right Brothers claim to be first. But, as quoted in The Economist, aeronautics curator Tom Crouch said, quote, should persuasive evidence for a prior flight be presented, My colleagues and I would have the courage and honesty to admit the new evidence and risk the loss of the right flyer. This whole disagreement did basically lead Ohio and North Carolina to put aside their differences and basically both say not Connecticut. Though. One of the things that gets pointed to a lot in this whole thing is like, look at how many other articles say this happened. They can't all be wrong, but like they're all articles that are spawned from one account. Yeah, they're all reporting one article, which continues to be an issue in media today when one thing will come out and a bunch of other people will re report that one thing without doing any additional reporting on their own, and then like there's now there's a story that's faults and everyone believes it. Fay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I Heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over so social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Today is the anniversary of the Wright brothers first controlled, powered sustained flight, which took place on the outer banks of North Carolina in three So Today's Saturday classic is our episode five, First Flight, which talks about the Wright brothers first flight, as well as the flights of four other aviators. Near the beginning of this episode, we note that the people were talking about it in it are all men, but that we have a whole section of our website devoted to women in aviation. Sadly, the format of our website totally changed a few years ago. We no longer have that round up page, but we do still have all those episodes and they include people like Jackie Cochrane, Harriet Quimby, Bessie Coleman, Beryl Markham, Lillian Bland, the Night Witches, and the women Air Force Service pilots. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class production of My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray cy Vee Wilson and I'm Holly fry So, Holly, you and I have been hosts of the show for a little over four years. Now is that all actually? Now that I think about it. Some patterns have emerged in the comments that we get when we share stories on particular topics over those UH coming up on five years, like mentioning Paul Revere prompts comments about Sybil Lettington, who we talked about in Six More Impossible episodes. UH posts about George Gordon lord Byron usually get replies about his daughter Ada Lovelace, who has also been the subject of a past episode. UM. Anytime we post anything about the Right Brothers, we get lots of comments about other people who are not at the Right Brothers who we should be talking about. Yeah, various levels from hey did you know about too? You're horrible and you ignored these important people. Right. So one reason for all these Right Brothers comments is that the Right Brothers First has a lot of qualifiers on it. People flew in balloons well before the Rights took to the air in a plane. There were a lot of gliders before them, as well as including ones that they designed while they were working toward powered flight. Powered dirigibles also predate powered airplanes, and there were also a lot of heavier than airplanes that managed to get up off the ground, but not necessarily in a way that you could describe as flying falling with style. Right. So when people say that the Right Brothers were first in quotation marks, uh, there's a series of very particular circumstances we're talking about. We're talking about an aircraft heavier than air that achieved a sustained and controlled and self powered flight with a person on board. All that stuff together, and really a lot of these distinctions are kind of arbitrary. There's also some legitimate conversation to be had about just how controlled the White Wright brothers first flights really were. Uh, there was some careening involved in some cases. So we're gonna talk about all of that today and some of the other folks who come up pretty often as people who maybe should be considered to have flown before the Right Brothers. And we're going to say right from the beginning that all the men that we're talking about today, we're all really remarkable in their own way, regardless of whether we get to say first before their achievement. And we also want to know that even though the people that we're talking about today are all men, we have a whole women in Aviation tag on our website that has lots of groundbreaking female aviators as well. We're not leaving them out, but we're gonna art just as a level set with the Right Brothers. So even among people who agree that they were first, there is still something to disagree on, and that's whether Ohio, where the Right Brothers were from, or North Carolina, where they refined their glider designs and took their first powered flight, should get most of the credit. Whether this interstate disagreement is good natured or not really depends on who you ask. And both states have references to flight, and the Right Brothers flyer on their license plates and their state quarters. So the Right Brothers started experimenting with flight in the late eighteen nineties. Wilbert wrote to the Smithsonian and to ask for all the prior research that they had on it, saying that he was quote an enthusiast but not a crank overall, though you know, aside from talking to the Smithsonian and whatnot, they were comparatively quiet about what they were doing. Other innovators, including Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian. We're making very public attempts at flight, and it was actually Langley that the Smithsonian first supported as being able to claim first flight status. The Right Brothers, on the other hand, were tinkering, refining, and learning from their mistakes, all without a lot of fanfare. This would become doubly true after their first successful flight, at which point they became very secretive, especially once they were embroiled in a patent or over their flight control system. So the Right Brothers shows the outer banks of North Carolina as their testing ground because the constant wind helped with the lift. They first refined the gliders that they were working on until they were satisfied with their aerodynamics, and then they turned their attention to power, developing a lightweight gasoline engine UH and a propeller. The end result was the six five pound eleven point eight one horsepower Flyer, which they tried to use for a powered controlled flight with a person on board on December fourteenth, three. This attempt at kill Devil Hills with Wilbur flying did not go well UH. Other than creating a wheeled undercarriage. They launched the flyer from a wooden rail, which it traveled down on a wheeled dolly on December fourteenth. Wilbur climbed too sharply after leaving that rail, and the flyers stalled and crashed. They had it repaired in time for another attempt on December three, and at about ten thirty five in the morning, Orville made a brief and as we noted at the top of the show, somewhat careening hundred and twenty ft or thirty six meter flight stayed aloft for about twelve seconds. They had set up a camera ahead of time, and John T. Daniels activated the shutter to take the now famous picture of the flyer aloft with Wilbur running alongside of it. They tried three more times that day, taking turns, with their best attempt being there last of the afternoon. Wilbur flew eight hundred fifty nine feet that's about two hundred and sixty two ms in just under a minute. Then the flyer pitched and, in Orville's words quote, darted into the ground. They sent their father a telegram that night to tell him the news. Unfortunately, back in their base camp, a gust of wind flipped the flyer over and wrecked it, and at that point it was too badly damaged to be easily repaired, so that put a temporary into their attempts at flight. The Rights kept refining and improving their designs from there, testing and making adjustments as they went. On October five, n five, they flew thirty eight kilometers near Dayton, Ohio in the right flyer three. This was its own type of first a flight measured in kilometers instead of meters was a feat at the time. Next we are going to talk about perhaps the rights most fanciful challengers was self taught French engineer and aviator at Claimant Adair. He was born on February four, eight forty one, and like a lot of the other early aviators, he got his start with ballooning. He made his first heavier than aircraft in eighteen seventy three, which was hold on a tether kind of like a kite. He also studied birds and bats, and they would go on to influence his aircraft designs. Adair's first powered aircraft was a monoplane that he named Aol after al of Greek mythology, and he was granted a patent for it on August eleven. On October nine, eighteen ninety, it left the ground and moved about a hundred and sixty five feet that's about fifty meters. But this wasn't really so much a flight as it was a hop he'd successfully made a vessel that could go in the air and come back down, but it couldn't stay in the air in any sort of meaningful way. There claimed he made another more successful attempt in September of the following year, although historians generally doubt that that one actually happened. In eight two, a Day was granted a subsidy from the French Minister of War to work on another aircraft. The result, after a couple of iterations, was the Avian three, an another monoplane with twin twenty horsepower steam engines with foot pedals to control the rudder, the rear wheels, and the speed of the propellers. There was also a crank that could change the positioning of the wings. This aircraft never really made it off the ground. On October twel it traveled around a circular track in Satsori, France, but it never really lifted off. It did briefly come off the track during a test on October four, but it didn't remain airborne. This was you could imagine as like if something hit a hit a bump and sort of leapt up in the air. It was that level of yeah, because this project was being funded by the Ministry of War. The government had a representative witnessing these tests, and that general's assessment that witnessed them was that though the Avon three had not successfully flown, those tests should continue. The Ministry of War disagreed and it cut its losses at sixty thousand francs. The avance he eventually made its way to Muse desal Emitier in Paris, but in nineteen o six, out Berto Santos Dumont, who you're going to talk about next, made Europe's first public airplane flight. So claiment and air was really frustrated that he had not gotten here first, and he started claiming that he had made a successful flight aboard the Avian three, having gone at least three or ninety meters during those October fourteenth tests. He offered no substantiation for this claim, though, and it directly contradicted what the general had reported. Flight historians generally agree that this is a fabrication, trying to get in on that um that's sweet, sweet first money. Of all the aircraft that we're talking about today, Adairs looked the least like a conventional airplane. He fashioned his with wings pattern after a bat and the avy On three's propeller blades looked like feathers. It looks like if a tiny race of forest creatures in a video game tried to make an airplane, which to me sounds delightful and I wish they all looked that way. It is pretty delightful. There will be a picture of it as part of the art for this on our website. So it doesn't appear that he ever actually made a successful sustained flight, but he did succeed and innovated in other areas, including in telephone technology. He gave a demonstration of his stereo telephone device at Paris Exposition of Electricity and he earned a patent for it. Later that same year. Adair died into Lose a March fifth n So next we are going to get to another, uh, pretty fascinating character. That is Alberto Santos Dumont. We're going to talk about that after a break. Unlike Claiman Adair, who, as we said earlier, was self taught, Alberto Santos Dumont was formally try in physics and mechanics, as well as in chemistry and an astronomy. He was born in Brazil on July seventy three, and he was the son of a wealthy coffee planter. When he was eighteen, he went to Paris to study. He was twenty five when he started experimenting with ballooning, making his first ascent in Paris on July four in a balloon he had named Brazil, and he quickly started trying to figure out how to build a practical balloon that could be steered so. At that point, as you may recall from our numerous episodes on balloon ing, most balloons could change altitudes, but they were really at the mercy of the wind when it came to the direction of their travel. Figuring out how to make a reliably steerable balloon required him to rethink basically everything from the shape of the balloon itself, to the materials it was made up, to the system used to steer, to the engine used to drive it. He wound up designing his own three point five horsepower gasoline powered internal combustion in that being one that was safe enough to use an hydrogen filled bag of gas, which at the time was quite a feat like making an internal combustion engine that was was safe enough and reliable enough to not set that bag of gas on fire. Was a big deal, and the Santos Dumont number one, his first attempt at a steered balloon, ascended on September eighteenth. He tinkered with the design and the Santos Dumont number three ascended on November eighteen ninety. He was able to steer it around the Eiffel Tower several times before landing. On October nineteenth, nineteen o one, the Santos Dumont number six took off from Saint Cloud, circled the Eiffel Tower and returned, and under thirty minutes was earned the Aero Club of France's Deutsch Prize, which had been announced more than a year before in an effort to inspire aeronautical innovation. This prize, which I mean this was an accomplishment for sure. They basically this prize at a hundred thousand francs, which they did because they didn't think it was actually possible that anybody would pull it off. So he won that prize and distributed a quarter of it to his crew and then gave the rest of it to the Parisian poor. And at first they actually tried to deny him the prize because it took a minute in twenty five seconds to secure the aircraft at the finish line, putting the trek just over that thirty minute mark. He offered to do the whole thing over again, and the judging committee ultimately reversed their decision. So this was the first really effective demonstration of a practical airship. Previous attempts at airships had been a lot more limited than this design. But after this success, Santos S. Dumont decided that dirigibles were way too influenced by weather condition to ever by weather conditions to ever become a truly workable method of transportation. So he turned his attention to heavier than airplanes. So back in Brazil he did the fourteen bees or if you're looking at its fourteen dash b I s and that's a boxy looking biplane with a twenty four horsepower motor. It looked boxy because it was designed from box kites, and unlike the Wright brothers who used a wooden launching rail to become airborne, he wanted to make an aircraft that could take off under its own means. His first attempt to do so, in July of nineteen o six failed. Another attempt on September seven barely left the ground, and then a few days later he made it a meter off the ground. And every time he would sort of address the problems that came up. Whatever he discovered that seemed like it was preventing him from reaching its successful flight, he would refine the design and then he would try again. On October twenty three, nineteen o six, the fourteen Bees took off, traveled about sixty meters at about three ft in the air, and then landed. A flight on November twelve, nineteen o six, flew two and twenty. Both of these were obviously after the December seventeen three Right Brothers flight, and he was in fact inspired by that success. The reason that people point to Alberto Santos Dumont over the Right Brothers is that this whole distinction of the wheeled undercarriage on the fourteen Beasts versus the wooden launching rail that the Right flyer was using. The argument is that the Rights flyer doesn't count because the plane relied on separate pieces to take off rather than an integrated set of wheels that were actually part of the aircraft. They're also some very passionate Santos Dumont supporters who argue that the rights didn't fly in three at all, suggesting that all their secrecy was really a cover up, and that there continued use of a launching rail was evidence that they had never really perfected their earlier designs. So I don't know if I would go so far as to say that's accurate, But in terms of this was a self contained aircraft that took off an or its own power rather than using a launching rail I got in my opinion is that actually has some merit. Yeah. Santos Dumont didn't stop with the fourteen Bees. He went on to design the Demoisille or Dragonfly, a practical light aircraft, and he published the plans for anyone to use to build their own. But in nineteen ten he was seriously hurt in a plane crash, and that led to him having a number of ongoing physical issues and it kept him from ever flying again. He had also genuinely, passionately loved flight, and he was terribly dismayed at the growing use of aircraft in warfare, and he was especially upset by because he felt like he was personally responsible. There had been so many developments and aviation that were either his or that built off of work that he had done, and in addition to the lingering effects of the nineteen ten crash, he also became seriously ill. He died by suicide on July twenty thirty two. In addition to the aviation awards he earned during his lifetime, he was a charismatic showman who became something of a celebrity. Contemporary accounts also describe him as flamboyant and somewhat feminine, and there's been some speculation about what his sexual orientation might have been. Today, he is still a highly revered figure in Brazil, known as the father of the Brazilian Air Force. Multiple roads and schools, as well as the town he was born in, have been named after him. Now we will move on to Richard Pierce, who, for our first year or so on the show was the person most often mentioned when we brought up the Right Brothers. He was a New Zealand aviation pioneer born on December three, eight seventy seven. He was a mostly self taught inventor and farmer, and he was granted his first patent in nineteen o two for a new style of bicycle that used pedals that you pushed up and down rather than in a circle. He invented a lot of other devices to including a potato planter and a needle threader. Thinking about what it would be like to ride a bike where you had to push the pedals up and down. It's kind of like a StairMaster bike. That seems sort of mean, but probably not. He was also working on ideas for powered flight. His first airplane design was a low profile monoplane made of bamboo wire, canvas and steel tubing. On his first attempt to fly it, he took off from the road adjacent to his farm on the South Island. He flew fifty yards or so and then he crashed into a gorse fence. So there were some witnesses to this flight. It definitely happened, but the details aren't recorded in any kind of official account, so there has been a whole lot of debate about exactly when this flight happened. Pierce was a bit of a loner. He never married, there weren't really people that he talked to day to day about his work, and he also didn't keep a lot of written records or notes. Then most cases, when it comes to things that he worked on. Patent applications are the only maaning documentation of what he was doing, and this is also why we have way less to share about his process than most of the other aviators were talking about today. Much later, in nineteen fifteen and nineteen eighteen, he wrote two different letters in which he remembered the flying having happened in February or March of nineteen o four. Researchers reconstructed various bits of eyewitness testimony to arrive at a date of March thirty one, nineteen o three, although some have also argued that it was actually in nineteen o two. And this is why for the first year or so after we joined the show, he was the person so often cited as a counter argument to the Right brothers. However, in fourteen, while doing while doing research for a book on Pierce aviation, historian Errol Martin found an old article published in the Timoroo Post on November seventeenth of nineteen o nine, and in this article, Pierce himself contractor x the idea that he was flying anywhere close to the time that the Wright brothers did. As he said to the reporter quote, I did not attempt anything practical with the idea until in nineteen o four the St. Louis Exposition authorities offered a prize of twenty thousand dollars to the men to the man who invented and flew a flying machine over a specified course. I did not, as you know, succeed in winning the prize. Neither did anybody. He went on to describe some tests of the machine that he was currently working on, a comparatively lightweight craft powered by a twenty five horsepower engine that he had designed himself, along with the rest of the planes components. Even the tests that he described to this reporter were more like hops than true sustained flight, and Errol Martin suspected that the reason that the nineteen o two or nineteen o three date persisted for as long as it did was because people were looking for substantiation that that flight occurred somewhere around that time, not six or seven years later. Pierce himself also said that he didn't fly before the Right brothers, and that he became motivated to work on his own aircraft after their successes. So the counter argument that we've heard most often in response to Richard Pierce saying that he had not beaten the right brothers was that he was just being nice. He may have been lovely, he may have just been being nice. But like, that's not a very substantive counter argument, right, uh. And Pierce died in christ Church on July. Most of the other men we've talked about today wound up influencing the greater field of aviation in some way, regardless of whether their attempts at controlled powered flight were really all that successful. And this was less true for Richard Pierce, but it was only because being in New Zealand put him really far away from where most of that work was happening. His plane, though, was pretty sophisticated for the time. It had wing flaps, a rear elevator and a wheeled steerable undercarriage and a propeller with variable pitch blades. Because he was so physically removed for most of the other people physically doing this work, though not a lot of people who were trying to come up with workable aircraft actually saw it or got to learn from it. Yeah, it makes you wonder if he were closer to those people, if his innovations wouldn't have accelerated the development of flight in a very serious way, and for a time after his death, Pierce's work was nearly forgotten. Fortunately, knowledge of his efforts did survive. An auctioneer offered his last plane to the Canterbury Aero Club, and aviation engineer George Bolt later bought it and donated it to the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, where a replica is now part of their collection. Although it seems unlikely that Pierce achieved true sustained flight in his aircraft, modern replicas word with ultralight aircraft engines has been capable of flight. So we're going to take one more quick sponsor break before we talk about our last first flight, which was by Gustav Whitehead. So in a weird little irony, Gustav Whitehead is not the name who is most often tossed out when we mentioned the right brothers, but he is the aviation pioneer who has gotten a lot of the most first in flight attention in recent years, particularly in the United States. He was born on January one, eighteen seventy four, and immigrated to the United States from Bavaria. He settled in Connecticut and changed his surname to Whitehead. From Viskoff. The idea that Whitehead might have flown first has come up periodically since the nineteen teens, and the most recent big wave of attention came inten and that's when editor Paul Jackson endorsed the idea that the credit should go to Whitehead in the centennial edition of Jane's All the World's Aircraft. Australian John Brown launched the website Gustav dash whitehead dot com that same year, laying out various pieces of evidence that Whitehead was the first to fly, including what's purportedly a piece of photographic evidence. So here are the claims. On August eighth, n O one, the Bridgeports Sunday Harold reported that Whitehead had made a half mile flight four days before on August fourteen, aboard a very bird like monoplane known as Number twenty one, and as still happens today, other publications picked up this story and mirrored it in their own pages without doing any additional reporting of their own on it. This report listed to ben as having helped Whitehead in this effort, and those were James Dickey and Andrew Seeley. In an article in American Inventor published April first nineteen o two, Whitehead himself also claimed to have flown for several miles over Long Island on January seventeenth of that year. He claimed that flight and another shorter one took place on the same day. From there, Whitehead made a failed bid to enter an aircraft in the aeronautical competition at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in nineteen o four. That was the same one that Richard Pierce referenced in his nineteen o nine newspaper interview. Whitehead built several other aircraft between nineteen o six and nineteen o nine, none of which, ever, apparently flew. When a Scientific American reporter visited him in nineteen o three, he was actually working on a glider and not on a powered aircraft. There were doubts about his claims even at the time. A much different article appeared in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer in nineteen o two, titled Unrealized Dreams Last Flop of the Whitehead Flying Machine. It detailed the various grapes of Whitehead's financial backer, Herman Lindy, who had invested six thousand dollars in two machines and was disappointed in the fact that neither of them could actually fly. The Bridgeport Post published a similar critical article on the same day. Whitehead died on October tenth, and then in the nineteen thirties, somebody stumbled over that initial article that had reported that he had a successful flight, so people started trying to track down confirmation of whether he had flown or not. Andrew Seely could not be located when he wasn't listed in any local directories. They did, however, find James Dickey, who not only said he had not witnessed the flight, but also said he was not even there. He did not know any Andrew Seeley, and he had never even heard of any flight and that or any other Whitehead aircraft. When an interviewer tracked him down in nineteen thirty six, he said, quote, I believe the entire story of the Herald was imaginary and grew out of the comments white had discussing what he hoped to get from his plane. It's also impossible to go back and review Whitehead's notes and schematics to try to replicate his aircraft and see if it actually worked, because he didn't leave any A few photographs do exist of his nineteen o one machine, although all of those show it on the ground and not in the air. No photograph is known to exist in the machine that purportedly flew several miles in nineteen o two, and no photographs exist of one of his aircraft in flight. There are photos of an unpowered glider as well as one that was flown without a person aboard. This new in quotation Mark's photo evidence that was alluded to is a really heavily enlarged detail of an exhibition that was shown at the Aero Club of America in January nineteen o six. This vastly zoomed in on picture shows a white blob shaped roughly like one of Whitehead's airplanes when viewed from above. People looking to support Whitehead's claims did interview a number of witnesses between nineteen thirty four and nineteen seventy four. However, their statements contradict one another or they're demonstrably false, and at least one of them was paid to give that story. All of those statements were documented at least thirty years after the flight purportedly took place, and meanwhile, his family, employers, financial backers, and other people who were working in the field of aeronautics at the time generally agree that none of his planes ever left the ground. Yeah, accurately reconstructing exactly when something happened thirty years or more after it happened, when there's not anything actually written down about it to jog your memory. That's kind of a tall order. So in the Smithsonian published a number of lengthy rebuttals of all the various Whitehead evidence, and then Scientific American did as well, refuting Whitehead supporters use of its own past reporting is support for their claims. So people, basically we're pointing to old Scientific American articles being like, well, right there, it says that he flew, and then Scientific American was like, actually, that's not what it says. Supporters often claim that the only reason that the Smithsonian won't seriously consider the possibility of Whitehead beating the Right Brothers Too Powered flight is that the contract they signed for the flyer specifies that they won't display a challenge to the Right Brothers claim to be first. But, as quoted in The Economist, aeronautics curator Tom Crouch said, quote, should persuasive evidence for a prior flight be presented, My colleagues and I would have the courage and honesty to admit the new evidence and risk the loss of the right flyer. This whole disagreement did basically lead Ohio and North Carolina to put aside their differences and basically both say not Connecticut. Though. One of the things that gets pointed to a lot in this whole thing is like, look at how many other articles say this happened. They can't all be wrong, but like they're all articles that are spawned from one account. Yeah, they're all reporting one article, which continues to be an issue in media today when one thing will come out and a bunch of other people will re report that one thing without doing any additional reporting on their own, and then like there's now there's a story that's faults and everyone believes it. Fay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I Heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over so social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.