The Wright brothers won because they were better at gathering information
Technology as a Search Problem
Technology is best understood as a search through an unimaginably vast design space: with 272 known physical regularities, the possible combinations exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe. Each bit of information halves that space. The author builds a simple simulation model, PTOP — Phenomena Triggered by Objects with Properties — to study how inventors converge on working designs, and argues the Wright brothers beat their rivals mainly by gathering information faster.
If we've got 272 regularities to work with, for example, then the number of possible combinations of these regularities is two, raised to the power of 272. But 2^272 is more than some estimates of the number of atoms in the observable universe.