21-03-2025
The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil.
PETRÓPOLIS, Brazil — Who invented the airplane?
Questions don't get much simpler. But in Brazil and the United States, the answer you'll get isn't likely to be the same.
In 1903, U.S. schoolchildren are taught, the Wright brothers piloted their Wright Flyer into the air in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and soared into the history books.
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?
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.
Moreover, he said, the Flyer III sustained itself in the air for nearly 40 minutes.
'It's just patently ridiculous, on its surface,' Jakab said. 'They're just trying to negate everything the Wright brothers did before 1906.'
That was the year Santos Dumont stepped out onto a field in Paris for a crucial test. The scion of a Brazilian coffee magnate had relocated to Europe, where he was famed for his debonair dress, fine dining habits — and aviation engineering. First came his affair with ballooning, and then the construction of his single-passenger airplane, the 14-Bis.
On that day in November, before a gathering of judges and reporters, Santos Dumont climbed aboard his plane and sped down the field. As a headwind bore down, according to historian Lins de Barros, the plane lifted off, traveling 722 feet.
'It took off by itself,' Lula said. 'Without depending on external devices.'
At first, since the Wright Brothers had been toiling in relative obscurity, French aviators heralded Santos Dumont's flight as the world's first. Now, much to Brazil's distress, the French and most of the world look differently upon that day.
'There is no doubt,' said Marion Weckerle, the aircraft collections manager at France's Air and Space Museum, 'that the Wright brothers flew before Santos Dumont.'
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?'
He walked through Santos Dumont's old home, now a museum. The inventor spent his final years here, horrified over the use of airplanes in war, before taking his own life in 1930. As Dodsworth Wanderley looked at the images of his great-uncle on the wall and the replicas of his inventions, word of his presence began to spread through the museum.
Soon, people were crowding around him. They were shaking his hand. Touching his arm. Asking to take his picture. Someone whispered that he was a celebrity. His visit was front-page news in the local newspaper.
'It's an honor to know you,' one person told him. 'Your DNA is very important.'
'What a privilege,' said another.
In this throng, there was no doubt who invented the airplane. But it was more an act of faith than a matter of fact.
'It's now an ideological problem,' Dodsworth Wanderley said. 'Pick your side and you'll find the arguments you need to stay there.'
Marina Dias in Brasilia contributed to this story.
