flying 262s again...

[tlclark]

On the Germans...

To add to the list, the American Sea-wolf submarine and the electric torpedo were both ripped off of German designs. And then there was the space race, which was more or less a contest between our Germans and the Soviet's Germans.

It has been said that if it weren't for the Germans there wouldn't have been a war, not even if you don't consider the whole nazi/fascism angle.

They were just dang smart. No doubt about it.

On the Wright brothers...

Yeah there were plenty of people flying before the Wright's. They were also crashing. The thing that the Wrights did was invent controlled flight.

In 1908 they demonstrated their utter superiority in Paris. Santos Dumont was devasted by how much more advanced the wright's design was.

It's positively silly to talk about others inventing powered flight. The Wrights owned that title.

It's kinda like a strange phenomenon I've noticed among Italian-Americans. There is apparently an Italian that supposedly invented the phone before Bell. All investigations demonstrate that while he had the basic ideas he was far behind Bell in actual execution. In sum, the claim that someone else invented the phone is just fatuous, but Italian Americans are just adamant about it. I suppose it dates from a time of ethnic persecution of Italians in america, but it just baffles me. Italians had the Romans, the Renaissance, Galileo...good grief. You'd think that'd be enough to assuage any inferiority complex. Why go whoring after the humble telephone? It's the same way with flight.

In many ways, the accomplishments of Santos and the Germans far outstrip the Wrights contributions, but I suppose there is a special yearning for "firsts" even if the "firsts" are far more humble than the later developments.

Personally, I'd rather be the culture that invented warp drive, than the one that first put a man in orbit.

Travis