Did An Indian Pioneer the Plane Before the Wright Brothers?

History celebrates the legendary Wright Brothers as the pioneers of flight. Wilbur and Orville Wright manufactured and flew the first fully sustained and controlled aircraft in 1903, being the first ones in the world to do so. While the Wright brothers deserve due credit for an invention that changed the world, one can’t help but ask: what if there was someone else who flew an aircraft before them?

This conspiracy theory makes you question your history books – and with good reason. Shivkar Babuji Talpade, an Indian scholar who lived in Mumbai constructed an unmanned airplane and flew it on the chowpatty beach in 1895. While the remains of this aircraft serve as concrete proof of his invention, there is still great ambiguity about whether it was the first airplane.

This is how the story goes: Talpade, a devoted scholar of Sanskrit texts and the Vedas, had always been interested in aviation. He studied the ancient vimanas of the Hindu mythology, as well as the Sanskrit Texts of Dayanand Saraswati to gain an insight on ancient aeronautics. With financial support from Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, Talpde created his own aircraft Marutsakha, ready to fly it over Chowpatty beach for an excited audience.The biggest question is: did the plane fly?

Some say the plane remained in the air for a few minutes, some say it held for only a few seconds. There are records stating that there is no way to know if it flew at all. The Marutsakha was a bamboo structure filled with liquid mercury, which would react with the sunlight to propel the aircraft into the air. It seems the structure did sustain this reaction and flew in the air – crashing in a few seconds. In 1895, this was a ground-breaking invention that was a significant step in the development of aviation in India. The question remains: was it enough to grant it the label of “the first plane that took flight”? If so, then why has history erased the work of this Indian pioneer?

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