In the US, today is both “Wright Brothers Day” and “Pan American Aviation Day.” It’s called Wright Brothers day in commemoration of the first successful flight of the Wright Flyer in 1903. It’s called Pan American Aviation Day in commemoration of exactly the same thing, with the addition of “stimulating interest in aviation…as an important stimulus to the development of more rapid communications and cultural development between the countries of the Western Hemisphere.”

“Pan American” flight would clearly include Brazil. But in Brazil, not only is it not Wright Brothers Day today; the Wrights are not acknowledged as the first to fly a heavier-than-air machine. That would be Alberto Santos-Dumont, who pioneered lighter-than-air flight in powered dirigibles he built and flew around the turn of the century, and later on designed and built airplanes that were far more modern looking than anything the Wrights ever came up with. Santos-Dumont was the first person to be filmed in a flying airplane, in 1906, and by 1908 was mass-producing airplanes for sale — 50 were built, but only 15 were sold, possibly because most people in 1908 thought airplanes were nuts, and might not even work.

But Santos-Dumont is not the only possible answer to “did anybody fly before the Wright Brothers.” There was also Gustave Whitehead, a German immigrant from Connecticut whose first flight in 1901 was documented in a newspaper. Whitehead may have even flown two years before that, in Pittsburgh, according to his friend Louis Darvarich, who said he was in the craft too. It was, of all things, steam-powered, and crashed into a brick building. There are photos of Whitehead’s later flights, but all the evidence from his pre-1903 achievements came from eyewitnesses, some of whom disagreed.

Then there was Clement Ader, who managed to get his first flying machine, the “Ader Éole,” to take off and travel about 160 feet. And he did it in 1890. The Éole was also a steam-powered aircraft, and to be fair, although it evidently did fly for 160 feet, it only got to an altitude of 8 inches, and it didn’t have any real means of control. After that, Ader was recruited by the French War Office for further experiments, and nobody really knows how successful he might have been; all the results were kept secret. Thanks to two world wars and who knows what other mishaps, no records have survived.

Reports at the time claimed that it took off and was able to reach 1500 feet.

Meanwhile, in India, Shivkar Talpade was a technical instructor who built the “Marutsakha” in 1895. There aren’t any pictures of the Marutsakha, and although reports at the time claimed that it took off and was able to reach 1500 feet, it was also supposedly powered by a somewhat dubious system relying on chemical reactions involving mercury. Talpade doesn’t seem to have been all that interested in flight itself, as he evidently never built another flying machine, and never even tried the Marutsakha again. But there are those eyewitness reports to consider.

Richard Pearse was a New Zealand inventor who built and flew airplanes early in the 20th Century. His machine was a monoplane, and although he himself never claimed to have flown it before 1904, other people remember him doing a successful demonstration flight in 1903, nine months before the Wright’s first flight. Airplanes weren’t Pearse’s only interest; in 1902 he patented an unusual bicycle with self-inflating tires. He definitely built airplanes that could fly, but since no detailed investigation of the timing was done until the 1980s, the eyewitnesses’ stories weren’t as precise as you might want — by then the only survivors had been children at the time. Pearse himself never claimed to have been the first. Except he might not be the most reliable reporter either; he spent the last years of his life in a mental institution.

Karl Jatho was a German inventor who built flying machines, and may have flown one for about the same distance as the Wrights’ first flights, but about a month earlier. His early designs were triplanes, and he doesn’t seem to have designed any reliable way to control them other than by revving the motor faster or slower. His claims to have been the first to fly are legally notarized affidavits by people who were there at the time…but when they gave their testimony, it was 30 years after the event. Jatho’s main interests didn’t include aviation, and he gave up the whole thing after about 1909.

Then there was Samuel Langley, the only aviation pioneer who was already well known before any of that airplane nonsense came up. He was the secretary of the Smithsonian, and as an astronomer, the director of the Allegheny Observatory. Langley took a much more academic approach to flight than the rest of the tinkerers and inventors, and calculated values for thrust, lift, and drag in order to understand how much power the engine would have to produce. He built a number of steam-powered unmanned models that he called “Aerodromes”, and tested them over the Potomac River in Washington (at the time he was the director of the Smithsonian Institution there). His unmanned craft worked pretty well, and he managed to get a grant from the War Department (and another from the Smithsonian) to design and build a piloted version. His calculations showed that an internal-combustion engine would have a better power-to-weight ratio than steam, and he contracted out the engine work  to other inventors — and the engine was a huge success, producing an almost unheard-of 50 horsepower. The Aerodrome itself fared a bit worse; in two attempts to fly it from a catapult on a river barge, it dropped into the river “like a handful of mortar”. Langley gave up the project. But for years the Smithsonian displayed the Aerodrome anyway, with the label “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” The Aerodrome pilot (not Langley) was pulled out of the river after both crashes, but may have been lucky. If the thing had really flown, it didn’t have any control surfaces, leaving the pilot with no way to steer.

So we might as well leave Wright Brothers Day and Pan American Aviation Day the way they are. The best lesson to take from it all is probably that if you’re working on some kind of historic first, make sure you have good documentation ready right then; don’t wait until decades later.