Could an able engineer and biologist had slowed aviation?

Suppose someone in the 19th Century managed to put together a working ornithopter, flapping wings aircraft.

Might that have slowed the development of aircaft as happened in otl?
 
Good grief, no, considering they'd have to have invented carbon fibre composites at the very least, in addition to artificial musculature that would revolutionise freight handling and medical prosthetics- at least. The spinoffs from the technologies you'd need to make ornithoptering practical would be revolutionary, transformational, and bloody useful to boot, and would almost certainly make Bernoulli- effect fixed wing flight practical in the process.

Ornithoptering is hard; to make it sustainable and feasible you would practically have to invent modern materials along the way.
 

Insider

Banned
Imagine Wright Brother reading a newspaper - a first human heavier then air flight takes place in {enter country}.

Would they be dissapointed? Maybe.
Would they cease to pursue their dream? I don't think so.
 
IOTL Otto Lilienthal just before his deadly glider accident was working on a motorized version of one of his gliders. As a means of propulsion he planned flapping wingtips. One would wonder what would happen if his death hadn't intervened and the design was complete and tested. (My guess was that -methodical scientific as Lilienthal was - he would have tested the device in flight, gone back to his lab and appalled by the poor output of the flapping device developed something akin to a modern propeller - not a windmill like many contemporary inventors used)
 
I have neen reading up on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Pénaud
Alphonse Pénaud (1850-1880) as he was an aviation pioneer from around the time you mentioned. Pénaud practically developed the use of rubber strands for model aircraft. A lucky feat because at least in model scale he had access to an 'engine' that produced a reasonable power output for its weight - albeit only for a limited time. So -at least for models- he had solved the engine problem.

Pénaud today is mostly known for his rubber airplane model, but in fact he built 'all three': First a rubber toy helicopter in 1870, then the rubber airplane jn 1871 and finaly a rubber ornithopter in 1873. Off all three, he choose to develop the airplane further, probably because he realized that this one was best suited to scale up. In his time, the helicopter got the most attention, albeit as a toy, the ornithopter the least.

So let's imagine the public reception would be different and Pénaud's ornithopter would get the most attention and various other enthusiasts would start building model ornithopters, improving on them and dreaming about a larger man-carrying version. Would this slow the progress of flight? May be, but not for more than ten years. After that it would be clear that the problems of scaling up a toy ornithopter are just as big, bigger even then scaling up a toy helicopter. And we're talking just about propulsion and strain on the materials used. We're not even thinking about stability and control (which kept the helicopter from becoming practical from 1905 to 1940) Eventually all model builders would realize that they were on a dead road -at least with contemporary technology- and put their attention towards the airplane.

Ah, yes... And after 1895 you would have Otto Lilienthal and his gliders, regardless of the progress in ornithopters
. After all, the progress being made in steerable baloons didn't keep him from experimenting on either
 
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