This paper summarizes the occupations and roles of 1200 aeronautical experimenters, authors, and company founders from the 1880-1914 period when the airplane was invented and the airplane industry began. Our hand-curated database has information on 15,000 patents and 23,000 publications in this field from around the world. We also have ...
(Show more)This paper summarizes the occupations and roles of 1200 aeronautical experimenters, authors, and company founders from the 1880-1914 period when the airplane was invented and the airplane industry began. Our hand-curated database has information on 15,000 patents and 23,000 publications in this field from around the world. We also have information on about 400 of the new aviation-oriented companies and 900 other aviation-related organizations or exhibitions from that time period. From this information we build basic biographies of the individuals who were active in the field.
Around 50-60% of the patent filers were engineers and the others had a wide variety of occupations. They were mostly from France, Britain, Germany or the US. A large fraction of these also published in the relevant journals.
The early airplane companies were founded mainly not by these experimenters and authors, but by companies or managers branching in from other fields, usually related manufacturing fields. From the beginning, the inventors and founder-manager were fairly separate groups of people, apparently in ways that are similar to those differences in later high tech fields.
There was broad interest in the problem of creating flying machines. Many of the participants in either the tinkerer or founder category went to success in aviation or some other field. At least 80 have Wikipedia articles now.
The database is public at
http://econterms.net/aero. Patent data comes from a variety of publications, and from databases and web sites of patent offices, especially from a collection of the European Patent Office made available by colleagues at the UN's World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO). The bibliography of aeronautics publications comes mainly from Brockett (1910, 1921). Many other sources had valuable data used on the web site.
A short version of this paper was presented at the 2021 ICHST conference, using these slides:
https://econterms.net/innovation/images/g/aero-ICHST2021-Meyer-final.pdf (Show less)