A social network model for innovation in early aviation history

Abstract

Using data from many historical studies of early aviation, we present evidence that early advances in aviation were the result of an evolving social network with more than eighty nodes and over three hundred links. The nodelink distribution is shown to be similar to a scale-free, power law behavior, characteristic of modern social networks such as the World-Wide-Web. This study suggests that technical innovation and invention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries flourished through complex social networks commonly assumed to be unique to the twenty-first century.