The Wright Stuff

On the anniversary of the Wright's first flight: using what they had, how is it they did it better than we were able to do 100 years later?

I would guess that there are few people today that have the experience and knowledge they had of constructions using wood, cloth, wire, spit and chewing gum.

I didn't know spit and chewing gum were used by the Wrights or the replicators, Where did you get that information? It seems that experience and knowledge using wood, cloth, and wire is much better today. Could it be that experience was the key factor? After all the Wrights were "mechanics" with considerable experience with lightweight materials and balance, and were focused on "success".

The Wright brothers succeeded where a lot of better-funded and better-educated folks failed. GaryBradshaw? argues on http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/Tale_of_Airplane/taleplane.html that the main reason for their success was that they'd hit on FunctionalDecomposition as a heuristic for exploring a design space that otherwise was unmanageably complex. --BenKovitz

They also employed UnitTests to a greater degree than other inventors. They tested each component (wings, propellers, airplanes) for each behavior they needed (lift, control, thrust) in isolation.