Which came first, the aeroplane or photography?

photography came first, by 77 years. Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph from nature.

Side by side

the aeroplane

The first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 36 metres — less than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. The Wrights' real contribution was not the engine but three-axis control, which they worked out with a wind tunnel of their own design after finding the published lift tables wrong. Sixty-six years separate that flight from the Moon landing, well within a single lifetime.

photography

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, made around 1826 or 1827 on a pewter plate coated in bitumen, required an exposure of at least eight hours. Daguerre's process of 1839 cut that to minutes and made photography practical. Photography therefore predates the telephone by half a century and the fax machine by seventeen years.