>Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right, as Burt Rutan, among many others, has demonstrated [1]. As with the conventional rear stabilizer/elevator combination, part of it must either be fixed or function as if it is fixed by augmentation with centering devices such as springs or balance tabs, and the forward surface must have an angle of incidence greater than the rear one (longitudinal dihedral.)

You're not wrong but nobody knew this in 190x nor could it have been reliably predicted because most of our knowledge about how low pressure gasses flow over surfaces in unconstrained environments (i.e. the atmosphere) comes from aviation which didn't yet exist in 190x.

Well, you can use models and wind tunnels, which, as Walter alludes to, the Wrights, unlike many of their competitors, did. The Wright Flyer was not airworthy by modern standards, but it served their purpose, which was to validate their approach and establish precedence.

The state of aerodynamics in 190x was more advanced than I suspect you imagine, with Lanchester on the right track in thinking about vorticity. Here's an interesting article on the divide between theorists and practitioners (which the Wrights partially, but not completely, bridged - and the theorists were evidently not all communicating with each other, either), and it also mentions the flawed assumption, of flying being like boating, that I mentioned in my earlier post.

https://www.aerosociety.com/media/4846/fw-lanchester-and-the...

It also shows that Lanchester, regardless of his theoretical chops, was not a successful airplane designer! He comes across as putting too much emphasis on how he thought things should be.

> Putting the elevator in front does not necessarily lead to instability if you get the geometry right

The Wrights clearly didn't. Around 1979 a Caltech scientist did a study on it, and determined that the flights of the 1903 Flyer went about as far as they could have due to the instability. At the 100th anniversary, a couple of exacting flying replicas were built, and flew about the same distance.

I'm not sure about this, but the mathematics of stability and control theory had not been invented at the time. These theories were developed alongside electronics.

However, it was still known that one puts the feathers on the back of the arrow, not the front. Just try shooting an arrow with the feathers on the front. It promptly turns around so the feathers are at the back.

As intuitively appealing as the arrow analogy is, it is misleading. In any airplane with a separate stabilizer, you have two horizontal surfaces, and in the case of a canard configuration, the larger surface is at the back. Also, in both configurations, they are producing a net upwards force (equal to the weight in unaccelerated flight.)