Inventing Aviation main page
One premise dating from the inception of this project is that “innovation” is of intrinsic value, or at least of arguable interest. Aviation is treated as quintessentially representative of “innovation”. This is intriguing enough, but it lacks to virtue of solidly objective quantifiability. Patents, for instance, are at least relatively manageable items of quantifiable pertinence, but the degree to which each exemplifies the abstract quality of innovation, is highly variable. We attempt to address this by a few means, including by the noted tracking of patents which make reference to earlier patents, the assumption being that a patent given external credit may be more innately and truly “innovative”.
This site is gathers and analyzes data about the processes leading to the invention of the airplane and the start of the airplane industry around the world. We keep pages on each of many items related to those technologies and the early industry and the people who made it happen. Data is integrated qualitatively and quantitatively, approached from multiple angles, as we draw data from multiple sources, multiple types of sources, antique or modern, analogue or digital, with page functions evolved so as to explicate items as they are quantifiably contextualized relative to other items and as they fall into categories. We keep some items that turn out not to be related, in order to make clear why they are left out of some analyses. We aim for complete coverage of these items up to 1916, and a few thereafter. If you want use or add to the data please cite this wiki as a dataset or contact us -- see About this site.
Most of the pages have a row of structured (table) data on them, and explanatory text.
Here are some of the tables and lists on this site:
- 17,054 Patents at least 15,014 of which are related to aviation: Wiki pages available as Structured data
- 2,530 Technology/patent categories: Wiki pages, Structured data
- 26,049 Publications about aeronautics and aviation back then or histories of that time -- Wiki pages, Structured data
- 484 Companies: Wiki pages, Structured data
- 951 Not-for-profit organizations -- clubs, research groups, government labs: Wiki pages, Structured data
- Error: Table Exhibitions_and_conferences not found.Exhibitions, conferences, and prizes: Wiki pages, Structured data
- 2,884 Aero inventors, patentees, and authors -- Structured data
- 696 Letters and telegrams between aero experimenters -- Structured data
