system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did seemingly uneducated individuals such as the Wright brothers and John Moses Browning accomplish such feats of engineering?

Is it related to the time period?

This question applies especially to the wright brothers, since aerospace is such a difficult area of research.
gpt
A proper education is just formalizing the process of getting knowledge. Just because they didn't go to school for aerospace engineering doesn't mean they were clueless on the subject matter.

The levels of details and feats of engineering are completely different between back then and today. Back then they just needed something that can glide and something that gave enough power to keep the craft up without weighing too much. And maybe not kill the pilot. Today aerospace engineering is more concerned about something being able to survive velocities that would tear limbs off human bodies, carry thousands of times more weight, and be able to do so in the most efficient way possible as safely as possible.