You seem very personally attached to this...

Yeah, Pearce even flew for a kilometer - that is huge news - and often landed in a hedge. Regardless, you don't need footage to know what he did was magnificent.

Again, MANY people throughout history tried to create successful repeatable flight - don't bother mentioning a kite (yes, I'm aware they've been around for centuries) since it can't carry a person. That's not what is being discussed (even thought the actual topic is proper spelling or lack therof in the forums... and has somehow migrated to historical innacuracies concerning modern air flight...).

I guess I should have been more specific - it's not the engine (you guys were arguing about something else - re-read MY post where an engine is not mentioned at all), and it's not the fact that a person went up in the air and came back down (properly, or stopped by bushes). The Wright Brothers (why do we capitalize "Brothers" BTW - I've always wondered that?) made something repeatable by being able to accurrately TURN to steer away from the bushes and back onto the clear strip of land they wanted to safely land on. Apparently Pearce made turns, but I wonder how much he controlled them, or how much control he actually HAD at all?

The WB's (see there, see what I did, the phonetics thing...? okay, it's not phonetics, it's an abbreviation much like the apparently disapproved of American States' names - see argument above) actually built the flaps for steering - having (YES) taken from basic plane designs from others, all the way back to the simply notion of how an object like a kite uses wind for flight.

Phonetic spelling... Anyone care to gripe about THAT? Gotta tell you, it scares me to think of my future medical records having to be translated by a 14yr old the doctors will need to hire to make sense out of things for the patients (namely ME - "What does 'U hav Knser' mean?).
-Lew ;-)