The subject of the 'primacy of flight' gained new momentum in Brazil after the controversial statement made by the respected aircraft scholar, Lito, from Aviões e Músicas at his Channel on Youtube, who believes in the version that the Wright Brothers were the first to fly, while one of pioneers in civil space flight and Virgin Galactic's credentialed space agent, Marcos Palhares vehemently disagrees. If you did no read the first part of this article, please click here.
After an exhaustive documentary research, which included reading several newspapers of the time, written in several languages, including all editions of L'Aérophile, a French magazine specialized in the subject of the time, from 1902 to 1910, as well as a CD-ROM with all the clipping from the Wright brothers, painstaking work never before done on the subject. Palhares definitively exposes the facts, and shows us in a documentary way that Santos=Dumont was, without a shadow of a doubt, the inventor of heavier-than-air (watch the LIVE in Portuguese).
The Wright brothers' first effectively public flight took place only on August 8, 1908, in which they were duly accompanied by a scientific committee, documented by photos and filmed in the presence of the general public. Prior to that, all other alleged flights had no proper documentation, were merely based on out-of-context allegations and photos, not different from flights performed by pioneers prior to Dumont.
Here I make an overview of the argument that Marcos Palhares, defending pimazia by Santos=Dumont, presented in a live made on November 12th, in celebration of the 115th anniversary of the first flight of 14-Bis, beside me, Luiz Pagano writer of this blog and of Henrique Lins de Barros, greatest specialist and biographer of Santos=Dumont.
It all started when Palhares visited The National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, he was looking for something about Santos=Dumont, and was enormously frustrated to find only a small model and with sayings that disparaged the Santos=Dumont flight compared to the Wright brothers . The institution had a strong connection with Santos=Dumont in the past, in part due to the friendship of Dumont and Samuel Pierpont Langley, another great pioneer of American aviation and third secretary of the Smithsonian, occupying the position from 1887 to 1906.
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| Live commemorating 115 years of the 14-Bis flight - Luiz Pagano, Marcos Palhares and Henrique Lins de Barros |
We know that airship #9 belongs to the museum, among other marvels made by the aviator – why then are they not exposed?
The truth is that there was in the United States the so-called 'Patent War', started by the Wright brothers, in which the magistrate ends up benefiting the secret and implausible Wright flights, reducing the importance of other really important American pioneers, like Langley himself, and the incredible Glenn Curtiss, completely ignoring events in France and the rest of the world.
These were flights defended by judges of law and not by scientists.
Who Was Glenn Curtis
To understand why it's important to 'some' Americans that the Santos=Dumont story be obliterated, it's important to know who Glenn Curtis was.
Glenn Hammond Curtiss (May 21, 1878 – July 23, 1930) was perhaps the most important pioneer of American aviation and founder of the US aircraft industry. He began his career as a rider and bicycle builder before moving into motorcycle racing, in 1904 he began manufacturing airship engines and in 1908 Curtiss joined the Aerial Experiment Association, a pioneering research group founded by Alexander Graham Bell in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, to build aircraft.
Curtiss worked in daylight, created the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company. His company built aircraft for the US Army and Navy, and during the years leading up to World War I, his seaplane experiments led to advances in naval aviation.
The Wright brothers, for their part, who claimed to have made the self-propelled flight on December 17, 1903, never had an engine (which makes such a flight an absolute impossibility). A patent applied for by the brothers called U.S. Patent 821,393, granted on May 22, 1906, shows a glider, not different from the one the Ukita Kōkichi used to jump off the Ashigawa River Bridge 118 years earlier (see the first part of this article).
Inexplicable gaps
Since the alleged 1903 flight, as well as the Wrights' own plane called the 'Flyer', everything was hidden from the public and the attempted flights only appear in the form of newspaper notes, never with photos, while their fellow countrymen Curtiss and Langley tried their flights in a scientific way, sharing and publishing their results in extensive reports with diagrams and photos, in magazines respected by the medium such as Scientific American and Nature.
That's when the 1904 Universal Exposition, also called the St. Louis World's Fair, was born, a world fair that took place from April 30th to December 1st, 1904, in conjunction with the Olympic Games, an ideal moment for the Wrights to show his invention since the organizing committee would even give prizes to whoever flew at the event – but they didn't go to the Fair.
Hamburgers, soft drinks and Hot Dogs were popularized at this fair, which had enormous cultural importance for American history, which was attended by Langley, Thomas Baldwin and William Avery.
Santos=Dumont went but had his airship #7 cut by a knife, possibly in an act of sabotage, on June 26, 1904, and the long-awaited presentation he would make, enormously anticipated by the American public, who by now loved Dumont , cannot see his flight (see https://santosdumontvida.blogspot.com/2012/02/como-santosdumont-fara-seu-voo-sobre.html )
What then explains the fact that the Wright brothers didn't show their plane at the event? Wouldn't a flying demo help them sell their airplane? Could it be that they weren't interested in the prize?
In 1905 the brothers claim to have flown for 38 minutes, and no one knew which engine they would have done it with, but in the 1908 public demonstration, in which the plane was catapulted into the air, they could not stay in the air for more than 2 minutes per launch, losing altitude with each flight until landing.
At the same time, in addition to the first documented flight in history on November 12, 1906 made by the 14-Bis, Farman won the third Archdeacon award using an Antoinette engine, for performing the first circular flight, Louis Bleriot and Joseph Lagrange who also used a Antoinettes also flew and remained in the air longer than the Wrights.
So why then did public opinion decide to accept the Wright brothers as the first to fly at the expense of all the others who were far more successful and scientific?
The answer to that question is simple! The Wrights filed patent applications, paid lawyers to redeem their rights against anyone who claimed to diminish or equal their deeds, it was said at the time that no one could wave their arms, imitating the flapping of their wings, as they ran the risk of being sued by the Wright.
Even so, the Smithsonian maintained as an aviation pioneer, believe it or not, Samuel Langley, who even without having had absolute success with his 1903 flight, received the title of 'Father of American Aviation', and then in 1914, Gleen Curtis successfully reproduced the Aerodome flight with modifications made in order to fly. This title lasted until the year 1948 – until that point in american history, the Wrights brothers did not have the scientific recognition of the Smithsonian Institute.
Another important point to note here is that, while the Wrights defended their meager feats with animalistic aggression, Domont, as always, elegantly wrote in his book O Que Eu Vi O Que Nós Veremos, Santos=Duomnt 1918:
“The following year the Farman airplane made flights that became famous; it was this inventor-aviator who first got a round-trip flight. After him came Bleriot, and only two years later did the Wright brothers make their flights. It is true that they claim to have made others, but in secret.
I don't want to disparage the achievements of the Wright brothers, for whom I have the greatest admiration; but it is undeniable that, only after us, they presented themselves with a device superior to ours, saying that it was a copy of one they had built before ours. Right after the Wright brothers, Levavassor appears with the airplane "Antoinette", superior to anything that existed then; Levavassor had been working on solving the flight problem for 20 years; he could therefore say that his apparatus was a copy of one built many years before. But he didn't.
What would Edison, Graham Bell or Marconi say if, after they presented the electric lamp, the telephone and the cordless telegraph in public, another inventor presented himself with a better electric lamp, telephone or wireless telephone apparatus saying that he had them built before them?!
To whom does humanity owe air navigation for the heavier than air?
To the Wright brothers' experiments, made on the sly (they are the ones to say that they did everything possible so that none of the results of their experiments transpired) and which were so ignored in the world, that we see everyone qualifying mine as "memorable minute in the history of aviation," or is it the Farmans, Bleriot and me that we did all our demonstrations in front of scientific committees and in full sunlight?"
General considerations
Anyone who sees Palhares' exposition of facts gets immediately convinced that Dumont was without a doubt the inventor of heavier-than-air.
Why then do we let the world believe it was the Wrights?
The answer to this question may generate revolt in some of us Brazilians, as it is closely linked with the self-inflicted "stray mutt complex" that some Brazilians voluntarily submit themselves to when compared to the rest of the world, with self-sabotage and limitless destructiveness power, which greatly delays our development and seems to cause a kind of collective schizophrenia, as well as a setback karma, very difficult to be redeemed in several generations.
It's very important for us, Brazilians, to take this scolding and start to change, because right now there are Brazilians, as or even more remarkable than Santos=Dumont, working on ingenious discoveries, aimed at the good of humanity, which deserves our full support (eg Professor Nicolelis, Ester Caldeira Sabino, Jaqueline Goes, etc.).
At this very moment, I'm doing a research and developing a production process for 'Cauim', with the objective of bringing this ancestral alcoholic beverage from South America to be consumed by the general public through modern production processes, (traditional indigenous beverage made out of fermented manioca, Brazilian kind of casava), with socio-cultural purposes of great value to Brazil.
Over the last 10 years, I have encountered all kinds of barriers to advancing the project, mainly on the part of inspection departments, without the slightest incentive to technological development, having to pay for research, experiments and travel out of my pocket, having to deal with the enormous bureaucracy, which has already delayed the launch by more than 5 years, with no prospect of a date for the creation of a new category by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (MAPA), It is a drink widely known by Brazilians, perhaps even more popular than chachaça, certainly more Brazilian than cachaça, which predates the arrival of settlers in the Americas.
Why is this beverage still not available to the general public?
Cauim has the potential, for ethnic groups that decide to join the project, of promoting their culture in a sustainable way, maintaining and even expanding the areas of standing forest, generating a return of socio-economic resources in a way that is unprecedented in our history.
Another experience I had with our people's disregard for our own legacy and culture, as well as the issue of museum management and our cultural heritage, happened when I was 15~16 years old, when I worked with Mrs. Ada Rogato, brazilian pioneer of aviation that in 1951, made the famous flight across the three Americas, with a Cessna 140.
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| Luiz Pagano and the Cesna 140 that belonged to Dona Ada Rogato - - "How can this plane survive its owner?! - When I was 16, I met one of the most special women in my life (I apologize to my wife Jane for that), it was Dona Ada Rogato. In 1983, I wanted to work, do something interesting - I started as a volunteer cleaning planes at the old aeronautics museum, in Oca do Ibirapuera, in São Paulo ,Brazil. The two other guys who cleaned planes with me, 'Colina' and 'Odilon', gave the following suggestion: -Go and ask that little lady, a bucket and solvent, to erase the scribbles of this Cessna." I never thought that anyone could curse me more than she... It was the plane that Dona Ada used to circumnavigate the Americas, every place she stopped, the locals signed and posted affectionate messages. Before leaving the museum, we stayed with her to hear one of her various adventures, in which she often had to put her life at risk because of that plane and its signatures." |
I volunteered to clean the museum and the aircrafts, and the only payment I got was listening to the amazing stories Mrs. Ada use to tell us, every day at the end of the working hours. She literally carried the museum on her back. After her death, the museum left Oca do Ibirapuera and the collection was spread out in a very irregular way, without us knowing where and how they are kept.
While people from other nations fight for their scientists to shine in the academic world and gather together to inscribe them for the Nobel Prize, we here give little importance to this and keep our hands in our pockets asking “when will a Brazilian receive a Nobel Prize? ”
While in the United States there are landmarks and memorials of the Wrights' achievements in Dayton, Washington and practically all other states, here in Brazil the museum of the oca was closed and its collection was inadvertently spread throughout Brazil. We allowed the Cabangu Museum to be closed due to lack of funds and for the National Museum in Quinta da Boa Vista to go up in flames on the last 2nd of September 2018.
While Tom Crouch, curator of the Sithsonian since 1974, has written two books about the brothers and defends the Wrights' achievements tooth and nail, here we have a leadership of museums that barely know the story of Santos=Dumont.
I was flattered by the invitation, together with Henrique Lins de Barros and Marcos Palhares, rescuing the importance of this Brazilian hero to inspire new generations, on the day commemorating the 115 years of the first flight of Santos=Dumont, it was a beautiful moment in my life.
This post is a mere summary, reporting my impressions of the LIVE - I strongly suggest that you watch it in full so that you can draw your own conclusions.
