A: The Wright brothers, of course.

Although it’s the sort of thing that any American grade-school student should know, the answer to the question “Who invented the airplane?” hasn’t always (or everywhere) been so.

Had that same question been posed to a Soviet citizen, he (or she) would most likely have responded with a name you’ve probably never heard before: Alexander Mozhaiskii.

Virtually unknown in the West, Alexander Fedorovich Mozhaiskii (1825-1890) was an Imperial naval officer, engineer, and early aviation pioneer. During the 1870s and 1880s he conducted a series of aerial experiments that included the 1882 launch of a steam-powered flying machine. However, as the flat wings affixed to Mozhaiskii’s contraption were incapable of producing lift, the aircraft relied on the momentum produced by rolling down an inclined ramp to become airborne.

Mozhaiskii’s vehicle “flew” in the same way that a Hot Wheels™ racer “flies” via its Thunder Launcher™ playset.

Which is to say, it didn’t.

Still, to this day, some official Russian publications (and the history exhibition at the Russian Air Force Museum in Monino) maintain that Mozhaiskii’s creation is, in fact, the world’s first airplane. No doubt, much of the support for this claim derives from the fact that Mozhaiskii’s device looks somewhat more like a modern airplane than did the Wrights’ design.

Given the propensity of Stalinist-era propagandists to claim Russian credit for the invention of everything from the steam engine, to radio, penicillin, and even baseball (!), Western historians have been prone to dismiss the Mozhaiskii story as just another example of strident Soviet chauvinism.¹ In actuality, the Mozhaiskii claim pre-dates Stalin’s rise to power by almost two decades. The story was advanced as early as 1910 in an article titled “The First Aviators” published in the most prominent tsarist-era newspaper Novoe vremia (The New Times).

Viewed in the broader perspective, such nationalistic claims are not as unusual or outlandish as one might think. The origins of the airplane were contested for decades before and after the Wrights’ first flight at Kitty Hawk. As late as the 1920s some Frenchmen continued to insist that Clément Ader’s bat-shaped Éole (1890) was actually the world’s first airplane. Meanwhile, to this day, many Brazilians insist that one of their native sons, Alberto Santos-Dumont, should be recognized as the pioneer of controlled heavy-than-air flight. Even in the United States, the Wrights’ triumph long went unrecognized by folks who should have known better. It wasn’t until 1914 that officials at the Smithsonian Institution finally acknowledged that the Wright Flyer and not former Smithsonian head Samuel P. Langley’s Great Aerodrome was the first airplane to take to the air.²

So, while the answer to the question “Who invented the airplane?” may now be obvious. It hasn’t always been so.

1. See, for example, the excerpt on “Aviation,” in Richard Stites and James von Geldern, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 479-486 [↩]
2. The best discussion of the early controversies involving the Wrights, Ader, and Langley can be found in Richard P. Hallion, Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 [↩]