How The Wright Brothers Blew It

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Nov 19 15:21:43 PST 2003


For the better part of a decade, now, I've compared David Chaum to the
Wright Brothers...

Read the article, and try to keep from laughing -- or blushing in the shock
of recognition.

National monopolies only worked for dynamite.

The Chaum patents expire in less than a year.


Cheers,
RAH
-----

<http://www.forbes.com/2003/11/19/1119aviation_print.html>

Forbes



A Century Of Flight
How The Wright Brothers Blew It
Phaedra Hise,  11.19.03, 7:00 AM ET

The Flyer takes off from Kill Devil Hill, with Orville Wright at the
controls, while his brother Wilbur looks on, on Dec. 17, 1903.

In 1905 the Wright brothers enjoyed a complete monopoly on heavier-than-air
aviation. They had the world's only working airplane, were the only two
pilots able to fly it, and had applied for a formidable patent that would
cover any plane with three-axis control. Yet within five years they would
regularly be surpassed by competitors at home and abroad, and before what
was remembered as the Golden Age of Aviation arrived in the 1920s, they
would be out of the aircraft business entirely. What happened?


<Snip...>





-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list