[derbOac]

I think the Newton - Ortega distinction is slightly different. Maybe it coincides with the Balto-Togo metaphor to some extent, but I think part of why the Balto-Togo metaphor resonates with people here is because it recognizes the role of the citers as well as the cited.

Your mention of the Newton-Ortega distinction is the first I've heard of it by those names, so I'm not entirely familiar with its scope, but in reading the Wikipedia entry it seems to assume the contributions of the scientists in question are somehow known, and it's a matter of "does science progress with lots of little contributions or a few big contributions?"

You can turn this on its head though, and suggest that "contribution" really means "discussion in the literature" which is a property of the citers and not the cited. So, if say, a Newton comes along and has a brilliant discovery, but no one understands it or it goes into the wrong outlet and isn't read, then there will be no impact. Conversely, though, if something comes along and there's a rush of recognition of a concept, and someone publishes it first, is that because this "big innovation" was associated with that first publisher, or because the readers all had the same collective idea, and they're just citing the first to goal?

The issue is that scientific development is not actually a property of the discoverer -- the discovery is necessary but not sufficient -- and the "size" of a discovery and who makes that discovery aren't really the same thing either.

I think that e.g., (1) finding that science progresses in big leaps rather than small steps, and that (2) there is a "first post" phenomenon doesn't mean that the big leaps are necessarily due to the first poster.

My personal experience is that all of this bibliometric research is a little distorted because so much rapid change in process has happened even in the last 20 years, and much of what actually happens in science and scientific credit is much more complex than bibliometric models allow. It's difficult to study big versus small contributions accurately when political maneuvering and social dynamics is such a big part of what happens.

It's interesting to think about, in any event.

[mandevil]

This is true not just for science, but for engineering. The Wright Brothers did some fabulous engineering work and documented their work thoroughly, and none of the other claimants to first flying are nearly as well documented, but let's say that some day conclusive proof turned up that someone else built a heavier than air flying machine that did get into the air and was somewhat controllable before the Wright's did it on December 17th, 1903 at Kittyhawk.

But whomever that was, was necessarily a dead-end- they inspired no one to build and no improvements came from their work. It was the Wright's work in 1905-7 with their demonstration pilots doing their airshow flying in their Model A's- that was what inspired thousands of other people to get into flying, into building airplanes, and into aerodynamic research and led to the rapid improvement (65 years and one day between Kittyhawk and Apollo 8 leaving Earth to orbit the moon). So even though we trace flying to the 1903 Wright Flyer, it is really the Flyer III and the Model A in 1904-6 that we trace all modern airplanes to. Therefore, it was what the Wright's did in 1906 that makes their flight in 1903 matter. But in a lot of cases those two steps were different people- someone makes the very first, another person or team makes the first practical one you can sell. And so who is more important?

[nautilius]

Hardly, unless the Wrights also inspired development of the Time Machine that allowed Prandtl to found the first aerodynamics research lab in 1904, or Lilienthal’s studies on the aerodynamics of stork wings, that he used to build and fly his own heavier-than-air gliders with, which the Wrights heavily relied on.

Many countries (UK, Brazil, France, etc) had similar local flying heroes that inspired advances in those countries. Your view is simply US-biased.

[mandevil]

While we are definitely back to the core question of "Great Man or inevitable progress of history" that characterizes the entirety of this discipline, I think that there are some key differences between what the Wright's were doing and everyone else. They were very open about how Lilenthal inspired them, but he was moving down a very different direction (trying to apply power through moving the wings, rather than propellers). Octave Chanute, the French-American engineer, was a critical node through which many of these early aerodynamic engineers communicated, serving the role that modern conferences and papers hold in sharing knowledge among all the people interested in a topic- including with the Wrights. But the Wrights still hold an important position in the birth of the airplane.

In particular, the Wrights found that their 1900 and 1901 gliders did not behave the way their math said they should, they spent 1902 recalculating from scratch all of the constant values that they had based their work on. They discovered that one number, Smeaton's Coefficient, a measure of the density of air, was wrong by about 40% (their value is correct to <1%, as best we can tell today). With the correct values, they built their 1902 glider, which behaved exactly as their math said it would, and laid the way for their 1903 Flyer. Again, even the 1903 Wright Flyer was pretty lame, but it took this entire lengthy process to get there, and the Wright's were the largely the ones pushing the envelope through this process. Other people would have, in the course of time, corrected Smeaton's coefficient, and then gone on to build the first airplane and the first one effective enough to be sold. But it is also true that the Wright's did all three of those achievements themselves, in the course of less than a decade.

Then, once their work was published and popularized, lots of people like Santos Dumont were inspired by them- he openly admitted that he built his first heavier-than-air flying machine based on pictures of a Wright plane. The French in particular quickly surpassed the work of the Wright's: Wright Co. was best in the world up to 1908 or so, and then got passed fast, mostly by the French, such that the US aircraft industry was far behind by the middle of World War One. Which is why English uses terms like fuselage and canard and monocoque for key parts of aeronautical engineering. The Wright Brothers were one link in a great chain connecting the first recorded stories of people flying- say, the legend of King Etana of Kish- to the modern commercial airliner. They weren't the only link, and they never claimed to be, but they were incredibly important ones. Were they irreplaceable in that chain? Well probably not. But in our actual history, their link was one of the biggest and most important.