I've become quite skeptical of "historians" who often write some fairly weird versions of events that occurred years before they were born, without having access to witnesses who were alive to verify facts of the event.......It seems that if someone beat the Wrights taking off on the world's most famous Fam-1 solo, that would have been revealed (and verified) long before now!
This debate dates back to 1903. Nothing new here. This is pretty much the best example of "pics or it didn't happen." The Wrights had the pics, others didn't. Ergo, they were first.
As Squeeze points out this has been debated for the Wrights claimed the first flight. Apparently in Brazil Alberto Santos-Dumont is considered the father of aviation and not the Wright bothers, since his airplanes had wheels instead of skids and took off without a catapult. If you want to read more there is a whole
Wikipedia page devoted to it.
The one thing that the Wright brothers had over all of their competing claims was not only the photographic evidence but also that they flew their aircraft repeatedly over the next few years in successively longer flights in very similar aircraft, including over 100 flights the following year in the
Wright Flyer II that were witnessed and photographed numerous times. Europeans didn't really buy their claims, and after seeing Santos-Dumont fly in 1906 were even more dismissive, until they made a trip there in 1908 and flew in front of thousands.
.......And thinking about how the Wrights made their money post-first-flight was by suing people who infringed on their patent, my personal opinion is that there may be something to this article... The Wrights were incredibly legally savvy for their day...
They had left the bicycle business and put all their money into the airplane business, their litigiousness and secrecy can be attributed to trying to make money out of their inventions which were often particular to their aircraft. I went to the
website supporting the claims and mentioned by
Janes, the evidence is really thin.