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It looks like early flying machine inventors thought that the same processes that move vehicles through water would work to move vehicles through air. That highlights just how inventive the Wright brothers were when they came up with a fixed wing craft. Yes, they had contemporaries with similar ideas, but they were first to make it work.

An artist can ‘conceptualize’ something new, but it takes engineers and testing to design and perfect new technology. Da Vinci’s famous notebooks are filled with all kinds of sketches. Jules Verne came up with the essentials of a nuclear submarine. But it took the Wright Brothers and some pretty thorough testing (wind tunnels, kite-versions) to do the spade work to make heavier-than-air flight a reality. And even they couldn’t have done it before gasoline-powered internal combustion engines had arrived (and they had only JUST arrived).

“It looks like early flying machine inventors thought that the same processes that move vehicles through water would work to move vehicles through air.”

That’s what I was thinking.

That highlights just how inventive the Wright brothers were when they came up with a fixed wing craft. Yes, they had contemporaries with similar ideas, but they were first to make it work.

There was a German or Austrian noble who had been pulling manned gliders behind a motor boat for quite awhile before the Wright Brothers. He contracted with a German or Austrian engine company to build a gasoline engine to his specifications to power his glider.

When the engine arrived, it was grossly overweight, and could not produce enough power to compensate. Had they built the engine to his specs, he would have been the first to fly a self powered heavier than air machine.

It looks like early flying machine inventors thought that the same processes that move vehicles through water would work to move vehicles through air. That highlights just how inventive the Wright brothers were when they came up with a fixed wing craft. Yes, they had contemporaries with similar ideas, but they were first to make it work.

The irony is that the Wright Brothers (understandably, for their time) thought that a flying machine merited a “super patent” - a concept which had arisen in US law, a patent which was so super that it would never expire. Ironic, because nothing of what the Wrights thought to patent is now still used in aviation.
If you’ve ever played with a model airplane powered by a wound-up rubber band, you have probably noticed what is, interestingly, the Wright Brothers’ invention: the twisted shape of the propeller. That twist isn’t used in powered aircraft, because its virtue is only applicable in low powered, low speed flight. By twisting the propeller blades, the Wrights arranged that the angle of attack of the blade was constant from root to tip even tho the tip moved so much faster than the root did.
But it didn’t take long for that Wright advantage to be mooted by advances in engine design.