Questioning Assumptions

I am learning from the unquestioned assumptions that I hold. Being born in the USA and taught in that school system, I learned certain things over the years. Many of these things I have forgotten but still think of as true. Coming to Brazil has brought many of these to mind and caused me to question them.

For example, if I asked you “Who invented the airplane?” what would you answer? Orville and Wilbur Wright correct? That is what I believed until I came to Brazil.

Going to a city called Petropolis this weekend challeneged my belief in Orville and Wilbur Wright as the inventors of flight. Petropolis was the summer home of Pedro II Emporer of Brazil and is about 2 hours from Rio. We saw the Imperial Museum in this city and we also visited the home of Alberto Santos Dumont, the man who Brazil claims invented flight.

I have to be honest, my first reaction was 'Who the heck is Santos Dumont?” As we toured his house we learned many things. Dumont was a native of Brazil who studied aeroanautics in Paris at the turn of the century. According to Smithsonian Online, in 1906, Dumont flew his 14bis, a box kite like machine, for the Aero Club of Paris. His plane took off on its own power, flew several hundred meters and landed without incident. He became an overnight sensation and was credited with being the first man to fly a heavier than air aircraft.

This claim was challeneged 20 months later when the Wright Brothers came to Paris with their plane. They claimed to have made the first flight in 1903 but had kept the flight under wraps so that they could gain a government contract. (See Wings of Madness, PBS website at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/santos/hadingham.html). The Wright Brother's plane was so more manuverable than Dumont's, that the Wright Brothers were given credit for discovering flight.

There is some debate as to weather or not Dumont should still be given credit since his plane took off under its own power. The Wright Brother's plane used skids to give it some power at the start.

Regardless of the exact answer, I was struck by the fact that there was another legitimate claim to who invented flight. I had never questioned the veracity of what I was taught in grade school. This may have been why I was surprised to read in Larry Rohter's book Brazil on the Rise about Embraer in a chapter we read before coming to Brazil. Embraer is a Brazilian Airplane manufacturing company. It it is the 3^rd largest airplane manufacturer in the world.

Rohter pointed out that Embraer intentionally did not complete with manufacturing giants like Boeing and Airbus. It chose to not make large air craft but rather focus on niche manufacturing and make small to mid size jets. It is entirely possible, according to Rohter, that the next time you fly on small commuter jet you are flying on a Brazilian jet.

Embraer, like Santos Dumont at the turn of the century, questioned the assumptions about how to compete in air plane manufacturing and got powerful results.