Here is some interesting history I came across the other day in The Financial Times. "When two American bicycle repairmen claimed to have built the world's first aircraft in 1903, they were dismissed as cranks. Newspapers refused to send reporters or photographers to witness any of their flights. More than two years later, Scientific American magazine was still insisting that the story was a hoax. By that time the Wright brothers had completed a half- hour flight covering 24 miles."