World’s First Aeroplane Was

Constructed And Flown By

Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, Not
Wright Brothers!

As we all are studying from our childhood that first Aeroplane was flown by
Wright brothers in 1903, almost all the books in the world have the mention
of Wright brothers when it comes to the invention of Aeroplane. But you'll be
amazed by knowing that the first Aeroplane was constructed and flown by an
Indian Scientist Shivkar Bapuji Talpade.
As we all are studying from our childhood that first Aeroplane was flown by
Wright brothers in 1903, almost all the books in the world have the mention
of Wright brothers when it comes to the invention of Aeroplane. But you’ll be
amazed by knowing that the first Aeroplane was constructed and flown by an
Indian Scientist Shivkar Bapuji Talpade. If we remove the dust from the
pages of history, we get to know that Shivkar Bapuji Talpade was the first
person in the world who successfully constructed world’s first Aeroplane.
There are lots of Indians whose names are being disappeared from the pages
of history. Lots of great Indian scientists did great discoveries in the past and
none of us even heard their names. Many western people cheated with them
and patented the discoveries of these great Indian scientists on their names.
Shivkar Bapuji Talpade is also one of those names who did amazing
discovery of an aeroplane.

Shivkar Bapuji Talpade belonged to a Pathare Prabhu community who are

said to be one of the founders of Mumbai. According to aviation historians,
Mr. Shivkar Bapuji Talpade used his knowledge of the Rig Vedas to build a
plane. Bapuji Talpade along with his wife designed the Aeroplane and it was
flown in 1895 on a beach in Bombay, that beach is present day Choupati.
The airplane was flown in front of thousands of people and it went 1500 ft.
high. The most amazing thing about this plane was that there was no pilot in
the plane and it was a remote-controlled plane. We can call it the first drone
of modern history.

Shivkar Bapuji Talpade was a great Sanskrit scholar and he had great
command over the Vedas and Shastras. He constructed this airplane with the
help of “Vimana Shashtra” by Maharishi Bharadwaj. Vimaan Shastra has 8
chapters containing 3000 shlokas which has all the methods to construct
Aeroplanes. There are methos of constructing 500 different types of planes.
One of Talpade’s students, P Satwelkar while talking to TOI has said that his
craft was called ”Marutsakha”(Friend of the Winds) flew unmanned for a few
minutes and then came down. The Airplane was flown infront of High court
sitting judge Mahadev Govind Ranade and Maharaja Vadodara Saiyaji Rao
Gaekwad.
Shivkar Bapuji Talpade collected thousands of people on the beach and
introduced them with an awkward-looking machine, people present there had
no clue about that machine. After some time, Shivkar Bapuji Talpade rolled
his fingers over the remote control and the aeroplane started to fly high,
everybody was shocked and people started scratching their head. people
were so amazed by this act that they couldn’t believe what they saw.

Shivkar Bapuji Talpade was expecting further help in his project and
Maharaja Vadodara Saiyaji Rao Gaekwad promised him that he will help him.
But things didn’t work well. British Government came to know about this
incident and they were so amazed. A famous company of London “Relay
Brothers” met Talpade and asked for the design and his notes of aeroplane,
in exchage they promised to help him financially to take his project further.
Talpade didn’t know about the conspiracy and handed over all the designs
and methods to them but they didn’t fulfill the promise and didn’t help him.
The death of Shivkar Bapuji Talpade is still a mystery.
According to historians, Relay Brothers were not able to understand the
designs and they handed over the methods to Wright Brothers. Orville and
Wilbert Wright accomplished their feat in California on December 17, 1903.
Their flight only lasted for 37 seconds and then crashed. Wright brothers
gained a lot of popularity and fame by this act, but Shivkar Bapuji Talade’s
name has not even been mentioned once in the pages of history.

When Satya Pal Singh, the minister of state for human resource
development, says that engineers must be taught the story of an Indian who
flew an airplane eight years before the Wright brothers’ feat, he is blowing
his nose over that candle. Singh is blinkered by his lust for Indian
supremacy so much so that he is fixated on an Indian, a Mumbaikar, flying
an airplane in 1895 – an event that may not have happened – and ignores
the enterprise that must have come before, and the encouragement that
should have come after.

The Mumbaikar in question is Shivkar Bapuji Talpade. According to some

reports, Talpade built an airplane when we was an instructor at the city’s
Sir J.J. School of Art. It seems he had been inspired by supposedly
descriptions of airplanes in Hindu mythology in the Vaimanika Shastra, an
exposition of the sage Bharadwaja, and wanted to recreate them. Anecdotal
reports compiled by Pratap Velkar, an architect-historian, suggest that on
the day of the flight, few were in attendance. However, another report –
filed by an author named K.R.N. Swamy in the Deccan Chronicle –
suggests that the then-king of Baroda was in the audience.

This contradiction is trivial compared to what came after. According to

Velkar and Swamy both, Talpade’s airplane stayed airborne for a few
minutes, flying over 1,500 feet before dropping down. The source of
energy during this feat was allegedly a ‘mercury vortex engine’: a drum of
mercury that, when exposed to sunlight, released hydrogen and buoyed the
plane up.

Mercury does not react with sunlight, although it could participate

in sunlight-induced chemical reactions. It reacts only moderately with
oxygen, so it’s not clear where the hydrogen comes from. More
importantly, Swamy claims in his article that Talpade’s airplane was able
to produce enough thrust to lift a presumably 200-kg airplane into the air
and propel it across 1,500 feet. Velkar disputes this. Finally, Velkar and
Swamy both speak of an unmanned aircraft while Singh has said that
Talpade flew the thing. It would seem the latter is not even wrong.

These descriptions, and others besides, have been thoroughly bunked –

especially by those scientific traditions of the West that Satya Pal Singh is
reluctant to agree with. The clincher is that if Talpade’s feat did actually
happen the way chroniclers have said it did, then anyone today building an
airplane with the same principles should be able to recreate it. This hasn’t
been possible.

All of this also misses the point. According to Velkar, after Talpade
completed his demonstration on an unmarked day in 1895, he wasn’t able
to raise enough funds, neither from the king of Baroda nor from other
businessmen, to build a second aircraft. State help was not forthcoming.
When Velkar eventually tracked down the research papers written by
Talpade to the possession of a scientist named G.H. Bedekar, Bedekar said
that the papers only reveal that Talpade had failed in his efforts.

We should not teach our students that Talpade flew an airplane. In the
absence of concrete evidence, we shouldn’t even teach them that Talpade
succeeded because it is only a disputed moment of success. We should
teach them that Talpade tried, which is more important. To build a candle
in the dark of our ignorance that flares briefly, controversially, and then
dies is useless. Our students must be equipped to build candles that glow
and glow.

As Aparajith Ramnath, a historian of science, wrote in The Wire, “To

reduce [research] to a battle for priority is to replace an intricate portrait
with a gross caricature.”
The point of teaching ‘ancient technology’, if it happens, should be to
inculcate the spirit of perseverance and entrepreneurship. A Shivkar Bapuji
Talpade today ought to be able to try and fail, and not have the
consequence of such failure bog her down for the rest of her life.
Moreover, the value of good research is born out of an invaluable global
contract. For example, the value of the contract between two scientists
working in separate labs is born out of using the scientific method to
perform their experiments just like the value of a 100-rupee bill is born out
of an economic contract between the citizens of a country and the state.

Sidestepping these contracts to create our own value system will take us
nowhere – neither further into knowing our past better nor shaping the
future. However, it is easily possible to simultaneously acknowledge value-
systems of the past, and the intellectual and socio-political contexts in
which they operated. So to acknowledge that Oliver and Wilbur
Wright flew an airplane for the first time in 1903 is to acknowledge a
contract that scientists and engineers abide by to this day: that the plane can
be recreated, that it will fly just as the brothers and other historians have
described, that it will bank on scientific principles that have been validated
over and over. But to suggest that it hegemonises the contracts forged by
ancient Indian traditions is misguided.

It does not, and herein lies the fallacious derision of the West that a part of
the modern, post-colonial India is given to. To describe ‘success’ in the
form of an airplane that flew according to natural contracts described
thousands of years ago and to describe ‘success’ as improving research
quality in the global arena today typifies the conflict that Singh and others
like him have been unable to overcome. This is the conflict that prevents
India from transitioning from an erstwhile giver of knowledge to a modern
taker, a conflict that a historian would simply dismiss as ‘presentism’.