Bleriot invented the airplane

Engine/weight up front–tail in the back.

The Wright Fliers are both at once more primitive, yet more advanced that what we have now.

Bleriot and others just used hinged flaps–where the Wrights used wing warping—something drone enthusiasts are just now toying with.

If you compare the propeller designs attempted before this time and theirs, you will see a fundamental difference. They understood that the propeller was most effectively designed as a thin, rapidly rotating wing, developing thrust in a forward direction, rather than a derivation of a ship’s propeller, a rather fat surface screwing through the air.

Their use of a wind tunnel showed them the best propeller design, as it did that of the wing. Everyone else basically just guessed, driven by an intuition that since air was less dense than water, an air propeller must be much larger and fatter than a ship’s, in the form of a rotating sail!