Photo from blog post "Kitty Hawk, A New Perspective" 11/14/17 Our blog, "Truth in Aviation History," has been a work in progress. And it continues to be. When we began our research a number of years ago, we never realized how many errors we would discover. It was like opening a Pandora's Box, chock full of aviation misinformation--provable "mis-history." I first cracked the lid when I began looking for answers to why a person as amazing as Glenn Hammond Curtiss , one of the most important aviation pioneers in history, would have so little mention in the many books I found. I might never have questioned this if he wasn't a cousin. The printed history smacked of a kind of mysterious bias or even collusion. There were shelves full of children's stories focused on the Wright Brothers, making certain that our youth believed the Wrights were the greatest pioneers, mainly because they were "the first to fly." That was accepted by all...
"What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out." - Bertrand Russell "Only a fool of a scientist would dismiss the evidence and reports in front of him and substitute his own beliefs in their place." - Paul Kurtz The cover of Boys' Life magazine Sept., 1914 Historians and the public, who want to believe the Wrights were first to fly, have many excuses for inconsistencies in witness's descriptions of` what happened at Kill Devil Hills, N.C., Dec.14-17, 1903--and indeed...
Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley's 1903 Aerodrome . The saga of a pioneer plane--and the controversy surrounding its history Professor Langley The Langley Aerodrome, front wings in place, preparing for a launch. The Background In the fall of 1903, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, attempted to launch a heavier than air, man-carrying, powered plane. The launch failed, as did a subsequent attempt; and his machine, christened the “Aerodrome,” ignominiously fell into the river. Only days after Langley’s second try, the Wright brothers claimed that they successfully flew their own powered plane at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina We are embarking on a parallel blog to "Truth in Aviation History" in which we will search for the truth about the Langley/Wright story. The link will be provided. An examination of the current "history" must obviously include a look at the constant revisions of so-called "facts" by a...
Comments
Post a Comment