The answers are "no" and "none at all."

The Wright brothers never claimed to be the first to fly. In his earliest scientific paper, presented to the Western Society of Engineers in 1901, Wilbur Wright alluded to English inventor Hiram Maxim, who launched a steam-powered biplane with a three-man crew on  an unintentional flight in 1893 with disastrous consequences. The crew survived, but due to the lack of suitable controls, the machine was wrecked.

Wilbur and Orville Wright wished to be remembered for making the first controlled and sustained powered flight. Their greatest contribution to aviation was the development of three-axis aerodynamic controls -- roll, pitch, and yaw -- and the piloting skills needed to use them effectively.

Even if it could be shown that the Wrights were not the first to achieve controlled flight, this revelation would have little effect on history. It is generally accepted that Robert Fulton was not the first person to build a steamboat, nor was Thomas Edison the first to make an incandescent electric light. History, however, rarely honors inventors just for being first. It is much kinder to those who are the first to effect a change in their world, for it is these people who are the most memorable. Fulton, for instance, demonstrated a practical steamboat to a large audience. News of his accomplishment precipitated the rise of steam-powered navigation. Edison not only designed light bulbs, but also developed the equipment for generating and delivering the electrical power needed to make electric light a practical alternative to gas light.

The same is true of the Wright brothers. As early as 1902, reports of their successful gliding experiments and descriptions of their gliders impressed scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. It positively galvanized the French and led to a flurry of experiments with heavier-than-air flying machines. Type du Wright aircraft -- airplanes whose designs were derived from descriptions of Wright gliders and Flyers -- were the first successful powered flying machines in Europe and America.

By 1908, the Wrights had developed a practical airplane capable of carrying two people and flying for an extended period of time (as long as the gasoline lasted). For the first time, the brothers demonstrated their invention before large audiences, showing the skills they had learned to control their machine in the air. In 1909, they began to teach these skills to students. These two events -- not their first tentative flights in 1903 -- mark the beginning of modern aviation as far as most of the world was concerned.  Within three years, aviators were flying successfully in every part of the globe. Aviation records for speed, altitude, and endurance were shattered almost daily as pilots and engineers took the Wright's basic concepts and added their own ideas. Airplanes evolved quickly and by World War 1 showed only a superficial resemblance to pioneer Wright aircraft. But they all used variations of the Wright control system and pilots used the basic flying skills the Wrights had developed. This remains true even today.

It is possible that at some time before December 17, 1903 -- when the Wrights flew their first powered airplane -- that someone somewhere made a controlled, sustained powered flight. But if they did, they did not effectively communicate this achievement to  aeronautical scientists or the world at large. Their work, however ingenious it might have been, had no effect on the development of aviation. Consequently, even if it could be proved the someone flew before the Wrights, it's likely that his or her name would never amount to anything more than an interesting footnote in the history of aviation.

As time goes on, it seems less likely that historians will turn up conclusive evidence of an obscure aviator who beat the Wrights to the punch. There are several interesting candidates, but their supporters have yet to prove their case.

Most of the evidence that has been offered are newspaper stories and affidavits, neither of which is considered conclusive proof. Browse through the newspapers from any large city between 1860 and 1900, and you are likely to find stories about successful flying machines. Recently, one of our members spent an afternoon in the Denver Public Library (Denver, Colorado) looking up information on Jerome B. Blanchard, a one-time prospector and patent-medicine salesman who built several aircraft in the 1890s. In the course of this investigation, he turned up three stories about other local aviators who flew successfully, beginning in 1869! While one or more of these newspaper stories may have been true, it's much more likely that they were all fantasy. Aeronautical hoaxes have been a tradition in American journalism since the 1840s when Edgar Allen Poe, newly arrived from England and in desperate need of money to hire a doctor for his ailing wife, concocted a fantastic story about a balloon that had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He sold this story to the New York newspapers, which never thought to check Poe's sources.

Even stories in professional journals such as Scientific American and The Inventor cannot be taken at face value. First of all, few (if any) of these stories are researched articles; they are simply letters to the editor. In these letters, would-be aviators stretched the truth or fabricated successful flights to attract investors and finance their aeronautical research. Editors published the letters without questioning their accuracy for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that aviation stories made good copy.

Affidavits from eye-witnesses to supposed flights are just as suspect.  They become more so as the elapsed time between the flight and the deposition lengthens. Because most people like to be helpful, that can often be coaxed into remembering things that never happened by investigators -- particularly if the investigators are insistent or attach some importance to the event. A. V. Roe, a pioneer aviator, collected a large number of affidavits to prove that he had been the first person to fly in England. But actual correspondence between Roe and other aviators from that time (among them Orville Wright) showed that the flights he made took place sometime after the dates that the witnesses had been prompted to remember.

What is needed to prove a claim that someone else was first to fly is evidence that corroborates the newspaper stories and affidavits -- diaries, letters, scientific notebooks, blueprints, photographs of airplanes in flight. So far, none of the claimants have produced corroborating evidence sufficient to unseat the Wright brothers from their widely accepted place in history as the inventors of the first practical airplane.