Who Was First in Flight?

While the Wright Brothers are popularly regarded to have been the first to fly an airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903, some believe the honor goes to two other pioneering aviators: Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil and Gustave Whitehead of Connecticut. Read about the case for each and decide for yourself.

Alberto Santos-Dumont’s Case

When tens of millions of people worldwide tuned in to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, they saw a well-groomed, mustachioed man portraying the pioneering aviator take to the skies in a vintage biplane. This was how the world first learned about Alberto Santos-Dumont. The declaration by Olympic organizers that the Brazilian Santos-Dumont was the genuine creator of the powered airplane may have astonished most observers, but not many in the host country.

While residing in Paris in the 1890s, Santos-Dumont poured money from his family’s coffee-planting riches into experimenting with lighter-than-air vehicles such as hot air balloons and motor-powered dirigibles. According to “Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight” by Paul Hoffman, the high-flying bon vivant even had a personal airship that he would fly from his apartment near the Arc de Triomphe to his favorite restaurant and leave moored to a lamp-post as he dined inside.

After collecting an aviation prize in 1901 by piloting a dirigible around the Eiffel Tower, Santos-Dumont moved his focus to heavier-than-air flight. While some remained skeptical of the reported achievements of the Wright Brothers, which were conducted in secrecy away from the public eye, the success of the flamboyant Santos-Dumont was plain for all to see on October 23, 1906, when his 14-bis biplane flew about 200 feet at a height of around 15 feet before a large Parisian crowd in the world’s first public powered flight. In less than three weeks, the Brazilian flew his winged aircraft 726 feet, setting the first world record acknowledged by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale.

Supporters of Santos-Dumont contend that the 1906 public demonstrations marked the beginning of powered flight because, in contrast to the Wright Flyer, which was launched off a rail and lifted off the ground by strong winds at Kitty Hawk, his wheeled vehicle took off on its own.

Brazilian physicist Henrique Lins de Barros, who has authored two books on Santos-Dumont, told Reuters in 2003 that the Wright Brothers’ flight did not meet all of the requirements that were in place at the time, which included landing safely, taking off without assistance, and flying a predetermined length in front of experts.

“The Wright Brothers simply do not fill any of the prerequisites if we understand what the criteria were at the end of the 19th century,” the man stated.

The Gustave Whitehead Case

It is said that a night watchman at a nearby manufacturing factory flew over the industrial city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in his homemade aircraft more than two years before the Wright Brothers skimmed over the dunes of Kitty Hawk. Four days prior, a German immigrant named Gustave Whitehead had flown 1.5 miles at a height of 150 feet above Bridgeport and the nearby town of Fairfield, according to a full-page item on page five of the Bridgeport Sunday Herald, published August 18, 1901. An accompanying hand-drawn artwork shows Whitehead in his bat-like contraption, known as No. 21 or “Condor.” Whitehead later said that he returned to the sky on January 17, 1902, and flew for seven miles over Long Island Sound.

Nevertheless, Whitehead’s assertion was beset by a dearth of supporting evidence. At a 1906 aeronautical show in New York City, Scientific American had reported that a solitary, grainy photo of the immigrant’s plane in flight had been spotted; however, the snapshot—if it ever existed—was lost to history following the article.

When an attempt was made in the 1930s to interview the two eyewitnesses named in the Bridgeport Sunday Herald piece, one could not be found and the other, James Dickie, said he believed “the entire story of the Herald was imaginary.” Still, the persistent claims stuck in the craw of Orville Wright, who in 1945 wrote a rebuttal entitled “The Mythical Whitehead Flight” in U.S. He said that Whitehead “was given to gross exaggeration” and “lacked the sufficient mechanical skill and equipment to build a successful motor” in an interview with Air Services magazine.

The case for Whitehead’s primacy received new life in 1987 when the CBS news program “60 Minutes” aired a segment entitled “Wright Is Wrong?after a copy of his craft was successfully flown by aviation enthusiasts. When Australian aviation historian John Brown revealed in 2013 that he had located a picture of the exhibit that was shown in Scientific American in 1906 and had the missing snapshot of Whitehead in flight, the debate escalated even further.

In the foreword of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft’s 100th anniversary issue that March, Paul Jackson, editor of the prestigious aviation publication, acknowledged Whitehead as the first person in flight as a result of Brown’s research. (Jackson’s evaluation was only his personal opinion, the publication’s corporate owners clarified in a public statement two years later.) Connecticut lawmakers then enacted a bill that was signed into law designating their state as “first in flight.”

The Wright Brothers’ Case

December 17th, 1903, Kittyhawk, North Carolina: The World's first flight with Orville Wright at the controls. His brother Wilbur is running at the side of the machine.

 

Orville Wright took over the heavier-than-air craft’s controls early on December 17, 1903, and gestured to his brother Wilbur. The Wright Flyer that Orville and his brother had built slipped down the guiding rail and shot 120 feet into the air, Wilbur sprinting alongside to steady the delicate machine. The 12-second flight that day was followed by three more by the two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, across the lonely Outer Banks of North Carolina’s dunes. There were a few witnesses to the first flight, and the Wright Flyer’s successful landing was confirmed by a photo taken by a U.S. Life-Saving Service employee.

 

While pursuing patents and contracts for their flying machine, the Wright Brothers kept a close eye on their tests and painstakingly recorded them. The brothers maintained a low profile and did not fly in public until 1908, two years after the Brazilian aviator dazzling Paris, in contrast to Santos-Dumont.

 

The majority of aviation historians think that because the Wright Flyer was heavier-than-air, manned and powered, capable of taking off and landing on its own power, and controllable along three axes to prevent crashes, the Wright Brothers should have been credited with creating the first successful airplane prior to Santos-Dumont. Supporters of the brothers also point out that the Wright Brothers were able to take flights lasting up to forty minutes by 1905, a year before Santos-Dumont’s first powered flight in Europe.

 

In a 2015 interview with radio station WNPR, historian and author of “The Wright Brothers,” David McCullough, refuted the assertion that Whitehead was the first person to fly. “There’s not a shred of evidence for it,” he declared. “Mr. Whitehead is not known to have flown anything, and his subsequent attempt to demonstrate in front of people was completely unsuccessful. About thirty-five eminent aviation historians have signed declarations stating that while the story is intriguing, there isn’t any evidence to back it up.

 

The initial Bridgeport Sunday Herald report, according to other Whitehead detractors, was probably exaggerated, and the recently found photo is too grainy to provide any solid evidence that the German immigrant was ever airborne.

 

While everyone agrees that the Wright Brothers were the first to fly an airplane, some of their supporters have a running historical rivalry that is seen on American highways on a daily basis. Both North Carolina and Ohio have claimed a piece of the brothers’ history. Both states had the Wright Flyer on their commemorative state quarters. North Carolina’s state license plate reads “First in Flight,” while Ohio’s state plate reads “Birthplace of Aviation.”

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