![]() That month, outside Paris and beyond the view of journalists, Vuia began maneuvering the body of his vehicle as a car later he added wings and practiced faster taxiing. He completed the full machine by December 1905. Still, that August, Vuia licensed his airframe design in France, and the next year licensed another design incorporating his 20-horsepower engine in Great Britain. The committee, adhering to the prevailing wisdom that the best design would be a double-prop biplane, rejected his single-propeller monoplane as a dream. ![]() He moved to Paris to join what he considered the hub of the aviation community, and in February 1903 he offered a design to the Committee of Aeronautics of the Science Academy. Though Trajan Vuia earned a doctorate in law in 1901, between scholastic assignments he sketched airplane designs. Besides the Wrights’ crisp, sensible designs, the world began seeing airplanes with more exotic or eccentric appearances-and some could even fly. But other inventors appear to have worked in isolation, largely unaware of other airplanes springing to life around the world. Many of the aircraft builders in this story clearly got ideas from fellow inventors a few of these designs are close duplicates of successful forebears. The 1912 edition of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft says, regarding Chile’s efforts in aviation, “There are vague rumors of machines building in Chili, but so far as can be discovered, none have got beyond the model stage.” Though that was technically true, a Chilean named José Luis Sanchez-Besa, living in France, was building both land- and seaplanes. ![]() Though big news locally, word of their success traveled very slowly. Many of the aircraft included here were the first to fly in their countries. And more settings too: In the first decade after the Wrights’ landmark 1903 flight, airplanes were being invented in countries far beyond America and the other two hotspots of early aviation: France and England. In the story of the airplane’s invention, there are more characters than just the Wright brothers.
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