Visions of a flying machine

What Hacker News says

1. netherMar 2017
   Visions of a Flying Machine by Jakab. About the Wright brothers. Basically emphasizes how they were consummate engineers, not scientists. In a field where there were not yet any textbooks, they zeroed in on what was necessary to build a practical airplane. They figured out each aspect (aerodynamics, controls etc.) to a satisfactory level, then moved onto the next without getting bogged down. They didn't fully understand the physics (they were by no measure aerodynamicists), but they knew enough to predict how their craft would do on paper, which is all engineers need.
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2. starpilotJul 2019
   In the book Visions of a Flying Machine (about the Wright brothers), the author's answer to this is "definitely." If the Wrights, and Santos-Dumont had failed, someone else in the world would have come up with a practical airplane within the next year or two. There were certain enabling technologies, like more efficient motors, that made it possible. Understanding of gas dynamics in academia was very high (Ludwig Prandtl was studying supersonic flow in tubes at the time), though fluid mechanics not as much. This is apparent in how rapidly aircraft development proceeded around the world after the Wrights, and how it left the brothers behind despite their patent protection attempts.
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