The Wright Brothers were 2 "bicycle shop mechanics" turned aeronautical engineers. They are credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. The brothers were called the "Bishop's Boys" because their father was a "Bishop" in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. He never read the verse in Genesis that says that "spies are despicable" (Genesis 42:31).
The "Bishop's Boys" were 2 British Secret Service agents licensed to ground U.S. and French airplanes.
They were as phony as "Discoverer" Christopher Columbus and "inventor" Thomas Edison.
Unless you are a born genius like Nikola Tesla, invention takes years and years of trial and error.
The Wright brothers reported to 2 men in London: Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell and Patrick Young Alexander. Baden-Baden Powell was "Mr. British Empire" personified and he was the brother of the Boer War Colonel Robert Baden-Powel–founder of the Boy Scouts Movement. He was extremely interested in developing the airplane as an instrument of war for expanding the British Empire.
Baden-Baden Powell was a British officer in the Boer War and he realized the military implications of the airplane.
He was determined to keep French avation grounded at all costs.
In 1902, he dispatched his spy, Patrick Alexander, to Dayton, Ohio, to give the 2 "bicycle shop mechanics" their marching orders!!
Here is an excerpt from an address given by Major Baden-Baden Powell to the British Aeronautical Society on December 4, 1902:
In his address Major Baden-Powell, speaking as a professional soldier, also offered the company his opinion of what the future might hold when a "practical flying machine" was developed at last. He said: "One can scarcely imagine any invention which could have a greater effect on the conduct of warfare ..."
In the audience on that December evening was a curious and remarkable man. His name was Patrick Y. Alexander, a prominent member of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain. Patrick Alexander made it his business to investigate personally the latest developments in aeronautics wherever they took place, in any part of the world.
He was so interested by what Major Baden-Powell said about the Wright brothers that he left London, almost upon the instant, and travelled to Dayton, Ohio, in order to interview Wilbur and Orville Wright about their experiments. Such was Alexander's ardour and keenness in the matter that he actually called upon the Wrights in their home in Dayton during a family holiday on Christmas Eve, 1902, only three weeks and one day after Baden-Powell had spoken of their latest achievements in his Presidential Address to the Aeronautical Society in London.
As a result of this singular initiative Alexander was now able to tell his friends in the British Army what the Wright brothers had actually accomplished, and what they planned for the future. (Golin, No Longer An Island, pp. 26-27).
It is plain for anyone to see that both men were working for expansion of the the British Empire.
In December 1903, the Wright brothers brought their disassembled "airplane" and a catapult from their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, to Kitty Hawk in North Carolina.
From Dayton, Ohio, to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina is a distance of about 680 miles (1,090 km).
A "real plane" would have flown in Ohio, saving them the long arduous trip.
The "plane" was just a glider plagiarized from Chanute and Langley.
Before setting out, the brothers consulted the U.S. Weather Bureau about the area's steady winds and they found out that it was the perfect location for gliding....They also valued the privacy provided by the location, which in the early twentieth century was remote from major population centers.
Supposedly, the first manned flight took place in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903.
In reality, a catapult launched the "plane," it glided for a few feet for the photograph to be taken, and that was the world's first powered flight!!
No newspaper reporters were present for an independent verification of that epochal event. It never occurred to the 2 bicycle shop mechanics to put WHEELS on their aircraft in order for it to take off as a powered flyer . . . and not as a glider.
In 1904, the brothers hired a patent lawyer named Harry A. Toulmin and asked him to file a patent covering every aspect of manned flight . . . except wheels. All they had to show the lawyer was the phony photograph from Kitty Hawk.
Lawyers can be deadly and they never invented anything to improve the condition of the human race.
One such lawyer was Harry A. Toulmin, who filed the Wright brothers patent in 1904.
Toulmin patented the idea of manned flight to cover almost every aspect of manned flight.
Toulmin also filed the Wright brothers patent in England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, and Belgium:
The application Harry Toulmin filed with the United States Patent Office in March 1904 would set the course of American aviation for the next thirteen years. Rather than simply specify the elements of Wilbur's wing-warping system as a mechanical construction, Toulmin expanded the notion of wing warping to cover any system where the angle of any device at the wing tips varied the "lateral margins" in opposite directions from the angle of wings at the centers. Thus Toulmin altered the patent from seeking exclusivity for a device to seeking exclusivity for an idea, the principle of lateral control itself. If such a patent was granted and ratified by the courts, it would apply to configurations that the Wrights themselves had not employed or even conceived of and so virtually no aircraft could subsequently be flown without licensing by Orville and Wilbur, precisely the breath they were seeking. (Goldstone, Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtis, and the Battle to Control the Spies, pp. 86-87).
The stage was set for a monumental international legal battle that would delay aviation development in the United States . . . and France.
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By 1910, France desperately needed a bomber to reach Berlin!!
By 1910, the French Republic was threatened with invasion by "Kaiser Bill"–the grandson of Queen Victoria. What the French needed was a few bombers to reach Berlin and threaten the Kaiser with retaliation. The Wright brothers patent suit delayed the development of the aerospace industry until after the war started in 1914.
Brazil-born Alberto Santos-Dumont was a naturalized French citizen and a brilliant aviation pioneer.
He was the first person to circle the Eiffel Tower in a dirigible.
In 1906, he flew the Demoiselle over Paris
Louis Blériot was another brilliant French aviation pioneer with so many firsts in his repertoire.
Louis Blériot was another brilliant French aviation pioneer.
He invented the monoplane and he was the first man to cross the English Channel in an airplane.
Unfortunately, his company was also grounded by the Wrights' patent.
Incredibly, the Wrights' patent was also enforced in France:
The preliminary injunctions issued by Judges Hazel and Hand gave the Wright brothers an effective monopoly in the flying-machine business in America for the first six months of 1910. Even when the restraints were removed in June of that year, the Wright patent suits continued to threaten American pilots and aircraft builders. Having forced the Herring-Curtiss Company out of business and placed Glenn Curtiss and other competing aviators in legal jeopardy, the Wrights, through their foreign licensees, launched a direct attack on their European competitors.
Late in 1910, the Compagnie Générale de Navigation Aérienne brought suit against six rival aircraft manufacturers (Blériot, Farman, Esnault-Pelterie, Clément-Bayard, Antoinette, and Santos-Dumont) for infringement on the Wrights' French patents. The case was tried before the Third Civil Tribunal, composed of three judges and a substitute, a state's attorney boasting special technical qualifications. (Crouch, The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright, pp. 415-416).
At the very time that the French Republic was facing her greatest peril, aviation development was stalled in the French courts.
Queen Victoria's grandson would never have invaded France in 1914 if that country had an air force capable of bombing Berlin.
The cowardly Kaiser would have hesitated before starting the war if he knew that his palace in Berlin would be bombed.
According to experts on the pioneer days of aviation, the Wright brothers' lawsuits in the United States and France delayed the development of aviation by at least 5 years in the crucial years before World War I. It was only the defeat of the British-Prussian axis that allowed the aviation industry to soar once more in France and the United States.