The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you’re in Brazil.
While the Wright brothers are widely recognized as the fathers of flight, Brazilians believe the true inventor of the airplane was one of their own.
By Terrence McCoy
Brazilians hear a different story: that the true inventor of the airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont — commonly described here as “the father of aviation.”
For more than a century, ever since he steered his 14-Bis into the Paris sky in 1906, the country has been trying indefatigably to give their man his due, regardless of the academic consensus. Santos Dumont’s mustachioed visage has graced Brazilian currency. One of Rio de Janeiro’s airports is named after him. A replica of his airplane, piloted by a Santos Dumont look-alike, swooped through the Opening Ceremonies of the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Now Santos Dumont truthers have found a new and powerful champion: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In his third presidential term, amid a slew of foreign and domestic crises, Lula has repeatedly found time to trumpet Santos Dumont, and even take a few swipes at the Wright brothers.
“I can’t even pronounce their name,” he scoffed in July
In comments to The Washington Post, the Brazilian president went further, delving into the minutiae of early 20th-century aerospace engineering and mourning what he described as the wrongful denial of Brazilian valor
“Everyone knows that Santos Dumont was the first to make something heavier than air fly, in an autonomous way, without any assistance,” he vented. “But the Americans have the movie industry and were able to promote the Wright brothers.”
“It’s essential to restore aviation history and duly attribute Brazil’s role,” Lula added. “A nation needs to have values.”
While in many ways a harmless kerfuffle, the dispute raises important questions about nationalism, the stories countries tell about themselves — and the limits of any universal truth. In other words, both sides are dug in.
“This is a very Brazilian thing,” said Peter Jakab, an emeritus curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “And in some ways, it’s sad.”
“This is a typical American thing,” said Henrique Lins de Barros, a Brazilian physicist who has written three books on Santos Dumont. “If it’s not them, it can’t be anyone.”
So the question, again: Who invented the airplane?
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Deciding what counts as a flight
In the spring of 1900, Wilbur Wright set out to find a windy location to test his aviation theories. “I’m afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,” he wrote a colleague, soliciting suggestions for a “suitable locality where I could depend on winds” to test his “flying machine.” His search ultimately led him to Kitty Hawk, on the North Carolina coast.
On its sand dunes 3½ years later, in winds that reached 27 mph, the Wright Flyer I rolled down a 60-foot rail and lifted off, carrying his brother Orville 120 feet. Three more flights were made that same day, the final one lasting nearly a full minute and traveling 852 feet.
“The airplane had been invented!” is how the National Air and Space Museum summarizes the moment.
Not so fast, Brazilians counter. How can the world be sure that this flight was legitimate, that the Flyer would have lifted off without a boost from Mother Nature?
“That was a region that was rich in wind,” said Rodrigo Moura Visoni, a historian of Brazilian aviation.
But the brothers weren’t done. The next year, the Wrights’ Flyer II pushed into the air in a field in Dayton, Ohio. And the year after that came the Flyer III. It achieved a flight that lasted for nearly 40 minutes and 24.2 miles — encouraging enough for the Wrights to propose the sale of the design to the U.S. government.
Because the Flyer II struggled to reach the air without Kitty Hawk’s strong gusts, and because the Ohio prairie afforded less open space for a runway, the brothers used a catapult when testing their next-generation flying machines so they could quickly reach the velocity needed to achieve liftoff. (Though a few brief wobbly flights, Wright historians note, were apparently achieved by the Flyer II without the catapult.)
To Brazilians, the catapult should be disqualifying.
“They didn’t take off on their own,” said Márcio Bhering Cardoso, the former director of the Brazil’s national aerospace museum. “They needed help.”
Seconds Lula: “The help of equipment and tracks.”
Presented with these claims, Jakab, who has written or edited three books on the Wright brothers, could barely contain his exasperation.
‘Brazil’s “argument,” he said, “is so easily deconstructed it’s not even really an argument.” He said it was “preposterous” to claim that the Wright brothers’ flights didn’t count because of a catapult. Navy jets, he noted, still use a catapult system when lifting off from short runways on aircraft carriers — and no one says they’re not real planes.
‘Will this dispute bring us anywhere?’
On a recent overcast day in the mountainous town of Petrópolis, about 40 miles northeast of Rio, a tall man of regal bearing stepped up to the house Santos Dumont built atop a steep granite slope.
As the aviator’s closest living relative, Alberto Dodsworth Wanderley has spent much of his life steeped in the debate over who invented the airplane. He believes to his core that Santos Dumont deserves the credit, and has spent decades advocating that position. But now, at age 81, with his wife ill, he no longer thinks the argument matters all that much.
“What’s the importance?” he wondered. “Will this dispute bring us anywhere?”’’