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Example chart from this research

On this site we gather and analyze data about the processes that led to the invention of the airplane and the beginning of airplane manufacture around the world. Our data on aero patents and publications extend from before 1900, when controlled flight was a dream, to the time when it worked in experiments, then became the product of a startup industry, and then a major industry supplying militaries in WWI.

Each patent and inventor has a wiki page. Each bibliography entry has a page. Each company or nonprofit organization has a page. Each historic letter has a page. We aim for complete coverage of these items up to 1918.

The invention of feasible aviation is an extreme case of highly uncertain innovation, insofar as there was not confidence that controllable aircraft could be built and how they would be designed. We can infer that there was high uncertainty from the fact that few firms were involved in the experimentation and research until its viability was proven in 1903-06.

We track “innovation” activity, whether or not invention or product "succeeds". Patents are countable, and we have learned the techniques to combine patents from different countries together. Some are literally re-filings of the same invention in a new country. We try to characterize high quality patents and low quality patents. High quality patents have inventions that are original, useful, implementable, and are more likely to be cited by later patents.

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:

Wiki features help keep track. Many reports here automatically capture new items as they are added based on their links and 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

Work in progress

Further notes and connections

We track institutions and factors that support or otherwise relate to aero innovation in this period, e.g. patent institutions, patent agents, national diffeences, administrative culture, patent classification systems, etc. These factors influence what data we see, too. The relevant inventors, authors, and other players were connected in information networks, and/or “social networks”. The incipient airplane industry builds on earlier networks associated with ballooning, and this affects the Industrialization‎ of manufacturing aircraft.

If you want use or add to the data please cite this wiki as a dataset or contact us -- see About this site.