Rewriting history

With the possible exception of the buffet table, it rarely pays to be the first at something.

People are forever attempting to knock you off your perch, cheapen your achievement, challenge your claim on history. Take for example the standard line concerning the age-old riddle of human flight as solved by those famous brothers known as the Wrights. All wrong, apparently.

As least that’s the position taken by the state of Connecticut. Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy last week signed into law a measure insisting that German-born aviator (and beloved state resident) Gustave Whitehead was actually the first man to fly — turning the trick in a bat-winged airplane on Aug. 14, 1901, two years before Wilbur and Orville Wright lifted off at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Whitehead’s supporters say they’re correcting a historical mistake. Supporters of the Wright brothers, including the Smithsonian Institution that houses the brothers’ historic plane, say those claims are wrong.

Connecticut’s evidence seems a bit sketchy. The state’s ruling is partly based on a very fuzzy photograph recently unearthed by an Australian aviation historian which purport to show an aircraft in flight in 1901. Scientific American has pointed out the picture is too indistinct to show Whitehead or motor or tow line and could easily be a glider. “Or a frog,” as one squinting pundit dryly observed on CNN.

If the enduring subculture gunning for the Wright brothers feels exonerated today, so too will all those other naysayers out there, those dogged challengers who press on from the fringes of the conventional record.

We haven’t heard much of late about that fraud Thomas Edison and the true inventor of the electrical age, Nikola Tesla.