[The Great RJ]

No man's life, liberty or property are safe when the Legislature is in session. Now add to that list sanity.

There were many early flight pioneers, but the Wright's documented their flight and quickly developed controlled powered flight. Whitehead may or may not have flown before the Wright brothers, but one photo, now apparently lost, and no other good documentation of the feat doesn't give him much credibility.

[a fool in paradise]

Heard some pair on NPR trying to shake down podcasters for money for having podcasts. They claim that they invented it in the 1990s. Except they didn't have a working protype device (at least from what I heard in the interview). It was pre-ipod then. They fell back to using cassette tapes.

I thought you can't patent an idea, that the patent goes to the first WORKING prototype.

[xp38]

The Wrights did a lot more than be the first. It took a number of years to convince the world they could do what they had actually done. Convincing a skeptical world was in many ways one of the most amazing stories in history. First in America then in Europe. Even if they weren’t the first they blazed the trail for aviation and essentially laid the foundation. There is no disputing that part.