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Are they righting a wrong or wronging the Wrights?
The Connecticut Senate passed a bill just after midnight on Wednesday that would delete the Wright brothers from history, explicitly stripping recognition for the first powered flight from Orville and Wilbur and assigning it to someone else.
Whether Gustave Whitehead managed a flight before the Wright brothers or not is a matter for historians to ultimately determine, not politicians .
The action by the Connecticut Senate has all the impact, and I assume the same motivations, of any of these moot court rulings from municipalities looking to boost tourism. For example, when the people of Cooperstown, New York had the idea of attracting tourists by building a baseball museum, they needed a gimmick to add a touch of bogus legitimacy. So they convened a court hearing which ignored the facts and in an upset, ruled that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown.
Are they righting a wrong or wronging the Wrights?
The Connecticut Senate passed a bill just after midnight on Wednesday that would delete the Wright brothers from history, explicitly stripping recognition for the first powered flight from Orville and Wilbur and assigning it to someone else.
From the article: In 1968, Connecticut officially recognized Whitehead as "Father of Connecticut Aviation".[51] Seventeen years later, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a resolution which repudiated the Connecticut statement and gave "no credence" to the assertion that Whitehead was first to fly, citing "leading aviation historians and the world's largest aviation museum" who determined there was "no historic fact, documentation, record or research to support the claim".
So this comes down to bragging rights between two states over the "First Flight". Indeed that is one of North Carolina's mottos (first in flight). North Carolina State Motto
If Whitehead sustained a powered, controlled flight before the Write Brothers did, why should the Wright Brothers continue to be regarded the the first people to ever do it?
How odd that the North Carolina General Assembly found "no credence" for the Whitehead claim. I don't think they looked very hard.
Since when does the Connecticut Senate have any authority to "delete" anything from history? Can Georgia's Senate delete the Trail of Tears from history, in order to better serve the parochial Gods of Pride?
If Whitehead sustained a powered, controlled flight before the Write Brothers did, why should the Wright Brothers continue to be regarded the the first people to ever do it?
They shouldn't, but the "if" part needs to be resolved.
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How odd that the North Carolina General Assembly found "no credence" for the Whitehead claim. I don't think they looked very hard.
Neither the Connecticut Senate nor the North Carolina Assembly is motivated by concerns for historical accuracy. I'm confident that if each of those legislative bodies decided to engage the finest historians on the planet to get to the truth of matters, each would have no difficulty coming up with an expert who declared in favor of the state that hired him or her.
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Since when does the Connecticut Senate have any authority to "delete" anything from history? Can Georgia's Senate delete the Trail of Tears from history, in order to better serve the parochial Gods of Pride?
They didn't delete anything, that was just lousy hyperbolic writing on the part of Jeremy A. Kaplan who authored the linked piece. The bill which was passed is one which honors Whitehead as having made the first flight in 1901. I didn't see any language in it which says the Wrights are now deleted from history. In fact there was this...
from the linked article..
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"There’s no question that the Wright brothers will retain their place in aviation history," Republican state Sen. Mike McLachlan told FoxNews.com. "And rightfully so. They just weren't first."
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