https://www.syllabi.directory/ "syllabi" or informational resources for getting up to speed on various topics: so far topics include clinical trial design, cities, English literature, and housing supply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Langley Early pioneer of aviation; in 1903 his steam-powered airplane actually flew farther than the Wright Brothers' famous attempt later that year, but crashed in the Potomac due to poor controllability.
an online acquaintance argued recently that the reason the Wright Brothers are celebrated as pioneers of flight is not because they were "first" to achieve sustained powered flight, but that they were the first to start an airplane company, to continue the project and iteratively improve and teach others. Lots of people claim competing "first flight" stories, but (including Langley's) they were all one-off stunts that didn't leave a legacy.
also (according to him), controllability is a key piece of the puzzle, and there's a tradeoff between controllability and stability (too "controllable" and the plane will respond all-too-vigorously to small random pilot movements) and the Wrights' three-axis control setup was the most successful and the one that came to be the ancestor of modern flight control mechanisms.