Simplex is comparing apples and oranges.
According to
his post, the French story reported that the 1908 plane weighed about 882 lbs and had an engine developing 25 HP. Using the division key on his trusty calculator (882/25), he gleefully announces that the 1908 plane was only capable of sustaining 35 lbs/HP - a number that in his conspiratorial mind is very tiny when compared with the earlier "lies" of the Wrights. Case closed.
However, regardless of whether or not 35 lbs/HP has some useful meaning, it's a single number that isn't meaningful in this context because it doesn't account for varying flying conditions he hides from us.
According to Simplex, the 1906 edition of Scientific American reports only that:
"At 38 miles an hour, they (the Wright brothers) were able to sustain 62 pounds per horse-power"
However, he is lying by omission. If you go to the source and actually read the orange language on either side of the single yellow sentence that Simplex quotes, you can see that it really reports how much weight can be sustained per HP
at three different speeds:
If you reorder the three data pairs in terms of MPH, from slowest to fastest, you get the following assertions:
- At 20 miles an hour, they could sustain 125 lbs/HP
- At 38 miles an hour, they could sustain 62 lbs/HP
- At 75 miles an hour, they could sustain 30 lbs/HP
The meaning of all this is above my pay grade, and it may be all theoretical since they never went 75 MPH so far as I know, but it's clear that the pre-1908 performance does not boil down to a single metric of 62 lbs/HP.
Simplex continues to try to manufacture evidence from the thinnest of threads in order to fit his existing bias.