You need to do a bit more reading.
You are quoting history and not the patent. Read the patent. Then look at the history and you will find that they did very little to INVENT an airplane. What they did was to refine existing designs, fix a math mistake and add some more to the sum of knowledge on control
Wright acccomplishments:
- Wind tunnel
- Ailerons (wing warping)
- Lightweight, high power internal combustion engine
- Propellers
- Rudder for adverse yaw
The fact is the Wrights were flying a heavier than air craft
hours and tens of miles before anyone else, including Santos-Dumont, who admitted their advances.
I think Santos-Dumont and Glenn Curtiss were innovators, but neither was in the same category at the same time as the Wright Brothers.
The wind tunnel is not part of their patent nor was it a new invention. If you really want to get into what they did there with that wind tunnel that was novel was to use balances to measure the affects on airfoil design. You should read some of the history about the Wrights, it is fascinating. I recommend the Bishop's Boys. It even gets into a lot of the patent fights that they had.
The ailerons are mentioned in the patent but their main control ability was the wing warping and was new but others were using types of control, weight shift was one, so the idea of changing lift was not new, just the method. Sort of like a new software process.
Propellers were not new or novel. That the Wrights had learned through testing that the arifoil design formulas were flawed was their break through.
Let me ask you this. Is is possible to patent a correction to bad math? Ponder that for a while.
The rudder was not new either. But using it to address adverse yaw was.
So lets summarize the inventions.
Fixed the math and used the rudder a new way.
Where have I heard this all before????
Oh yeah, in the post of mine that you quoted.
Yes. The biggest thing they did to solve the problem of flight was to fix the math on airfoil design. The 2nd biggest part was that they came up with the rudder to counteract adverse yaw. They neither invented the wing nor the rudder. Gliders had been flying for what? A couple of decades when the Wrights flew their machine. Even then the idea of controlled flight had already been proven Alberto Santo-DuMont had demonstrated that in dirigibles in 1901.
