If you go to a bank asking to borrow money they might ask "what collateral do you have to secure a loan?". If you own a house, they would ask you to bring in the property title document to prove to them that you own it (or some title company would do that work for them).
Patents can serve a similar purpose: you want to borrow money from an investor to develop a product idea into a commercial product: they might say "what patents do you have?". To them, the patent document serves a similar purpose to the property title in the bank loan case: a piece of paper that makes them think there's something of value that they can ultimately take from you or sell if the company doesn't succeed, or at least something that gives them a warmer and fuzzier feeling that if you were just saying "Trust me I know what I'm doing".
I'd argue it's not. (But I still believe the patents other claims, and as a whole was obviously violated.)
You can't go of of the language of today to judge the claim. After all, the Wright brothers use "flying machine" to describe what we call an "airplane", and the term "aeroplane" to describe what we call a "wing".
Remember, the method and implementation is what's patentable, not the concept.
It doesn't really matter if we'd call a warped wing an aileron or not, or that it accomplishes the same objective.
It only matters how the implementation of the invention is described, and what elements are claimed (and in what combinations).
The patent disclosed the theory of using ailerons for control. Claim 1 refers to “lateral marginal portions” of the wing “capable of movement to different positions above and below the normal plane of the airplane.” That’s an aileron.
The embodiment in the patent happened to use a warping wing, but as a matter of physics and the patent drafting, the invention was using such lateral movable surfaces for control, not a particular way of building such a surface.
Additionally, the article fails to note the importance of patents to the other side. The Arial Experimental Association was bankrolled by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell had relied heavily on patents to secure investor capital that he used to build his business and eventually his research lab. See: http://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art.... (The same is true, incidentally, for Edison.)
One of the fictions we indulge is that invention is all about inventors. In fact, it’s at least as much about investors. The aviation patent wars is much easier to understand if you look at the business and investment structures that created American airplane companies in the first place: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=4210000891220850...