Talk:Pedro Paulet

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Untitled[edit]

The claims of this article are completely false. Not a single objective evidence has been found to support the claims of Paulet. If Peulet's story is true, evidence should be brought froward. Otherwise this article should be deleted.--186.50.67.87 (talk) 15:15, 14 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Copyvio[edit]

This article is a very obvious copyvio with POV content, although i can't provide the proper source for this.--Andersmusician VOTE 18:07, 30 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've reverted the last edit which was made by an IP and seems to be a flagrant copyvio. --Victor12 (talk) 19:37, 30 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Lack of reliable sources?[edit]

Maybe I'm missing something but I can't find any reliable sources cited for the rather grandiose claims made here. I've reduced the authoritative tone of some of the claims, worded some of the others as "alleged", and added an {{Unreferenced}} tag to the article. UncleBubba (Talk) 20:43, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank-you. Paulet's claim in 1927 has no proof to back it up and might simply be a fraudulent attempt for publicity. People who patented or demonstrated their inventions deserve the real credit. DonPMitchell (talk) 04:24, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Paulet holds a strong educational background which makes his claim quite credible. Scientific history is a field which is extremely subject to change, and no doubt Paulet will receive greater credit for his successful experimentations in the near future.--MarshalN20 | Talk 04:27, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
While I doubt your prediction will pan out, WP articles cannot contain information without citing reliable sources. A single article, written by a relative, in payment of a debt, is not reliable. I've replaced the citation needed templates, which must stay in place until reliable sources are cited. Sorry. — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 04:06, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like there's a good citation for the idea it never happened. John Clark, Ignition! page 7 :

In a letter to El Comercio, of Lima, Peru, 7 October, 1927, one Pedro A. Paulet, a Peruvian chemical engineer, claimed to have experimented —in 1895-97 (!) — with a rocket motor burning gasoline and nitrogen tetroxide. If this claim has any foundation in fact, Paulet anticipated not only Goddard but even Tsiolkovsky.

However, consider these facts. Paulet claimed that his motor produced a thrust of 200 pounds, and that it fired intermittently, 300 times a minute, instead of continuously as conventional rocket motors do. He also claimed that he did his experimental work *in* Paris. Now, I know how much noise a 200-pound motor makes. And I know that if one were fired three hundred times a minute —the rate at which a watch ticks —it would sound like a whole battery of fully automatic 75 millimeter antiaircraft guns. Such a racket would have convinced the Parisians that the Commune had returned to take its vengeance on the Republic, and would certainly be remembered by somebody beside Paulet! But only Paulet remembered.

In my book, Paulet's claims are completely false, and his alleged firings never took place.

86.179.238.32 (talk) 16:15, 14 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I just stumbled upon this article after being absent for several years. It hasn't gotten any better, and the worst citation is the one from the "21sci-tech.com" site. It, in turn, cites a book, World History of Aeronautics, that I can find no evidence was ever written. And the quotes are from a relative of Paulet's, published "in payment of a debt". Sheesh... — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 00:00, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The Citation That Wasn't[edit]

A reference is listed that points to a site run by David Darling, a British astronomer and science writer. Whether or not the site's content is suspect is not nearly as important as what it says. Some examples, from http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/Paulet.html (emphasis added, below):

  • Paulet is a "chemical engineer reputed to have conducted experiments" ... "on a rocket motor"
  • "If true, this would credit Paulet as the designer"
  • "It was said to have been capable of"
  • "Paulet claimed that his rocket motor could"
  • "news of what may have been a groundbreaking advance"
  • "Paulet sought witnesses to help verify the work he said he had done years earlier"
  • "Had Paulet's work been authenticated"

Based on this, I'll be removing the !ref from the article shortly unless someone can think of a reason not to do so (in keeping with WP policies, though). — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 19:03, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think the ref should deleted as it does not add anything to the article. I suggest that the link to the NASA paper on the subject of Paulet's claims be added back in (or referenced) as the NASA paper seems to present a balanced and comprehensive review of the subject. The article by the way now has a subheading 'References' with no content. Orenburg1 (talk) 08:18, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're correct. That section has been empty for a while, IIRC. — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 17:47, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It took me a while to find the Ordway paper but I did. And it's a good one. I am going to--very soon--remove all the unsourced statements from this article and insert some information from the paper. (That will shorten it quite a bit.) Thanks for the pointer. — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 18:10, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think that would be a good solution rather than having a somewhat messy article with all those 'Citation needed' tags (correctly inserted at the time). Orenburg1 (talk) 18:38, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment comment[edit]

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Pedro Paulet/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

the guy theorized application of liquid fuel on aircraft engines.
Not really. The guy claimed to have done a bunch of stuff. There are few--if any--reliable sources that corroborate his assertions. — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 18:22, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Last edited at 18:22, 31 March 2011 (UTC). Substituted at 02:33, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

What appears to be an UNreliable source[edit]

From time to time, this link is dropped into this WP article: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/winter01/paulet.html. What isn't often mentioned is this statement from the article: Sara Madueño heads the Lima bureau of Executive Intelligence Review magazine in Peru and is a long-time political collaborator of international statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. She notes that this article is in payment of a long-standing debt to Megan Paulet, daughter of Pedro Paulet, and is written in memory of her own mother, Sara Paulet de Madueño, Pedro Paulet’s niece.

Lyndon LaRouche was a convicted fraudster, so anything sponsored by him deserves, at least, a careful vetting.

Cleaning up this article is a P.I.T.A., mainly because—as has been pointed out before—it probably should not even exist in WP. — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 21:19, 3 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I just removed an unsourced entry about Paulet from the Aeronautics article. Orenburg1 (talk) 16:14, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent! Thank you! I (among others, I'm sure) have nothing against Paulet, per se, but just refuse to stand by idly when people lie to promote themselves. The problem is that there are many folks (including some from Paulet's own country), who exaggerate his accomplishments as a matter of national pride. Truth is truth... — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 17:58, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Short description[edit]

I just reverted a change to the short description that added some apparently unsourced claims. As I told the editor, I'm not sure if anyone will ever know the truth, but Paulet's claim of inventing liquid-fueled rocketry appears very close to fraud. Many have searched for evidence to back up his claims, only to come up with a single article of dubious merit and provenance (along with a couple of derivative works based on it). If I knew of examples of Paulet's inventing anything, I wouldn't mind calling him that, but I can't. Based on the verifiable, reliably-sourced evidence, we probably shouldn't call him anything other than a diplomat. — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 12:17, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of dubious categories[edit]

I removed the Spaceflight Portal entry, as well as these unsourced/unverified categories:

  • Peruvian inventors
  • Peruvian scientists
  • Peruvian engineers
  • Rocket scientists
  • Early spaceflight scientists

Categories are important, especially for students trying to research their work, so I think it best we try to keep unsourced info out of article space. Cheers! — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 13:53, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Additions citing a paper written by a moviemaker with a possible COI[edit]

Some recent additions to the article reference a paper written by Peruvian author Álvaro Mejía and published on the Catholic University of San Pablo's website. This paper makes some fairly amazing claims about Pedro Paulet's life and work, and blames Paulet's obscurity on his reserved nature, which the author calls "mysterious".

The author's credits at the head of the article provide a clue as to his motivation for writing it:

Álvaro Mejía has a degree in Communication from the University of Lima. He has been a screenwriter for television series and directed short films. Currently, after more than ten years of research in national and international archives and thanks to a prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture, he is making his first feature film, The Boy Who Dreamed of the Moon, a documentary that rescues the work of aerospace pioneer Pedro Paulet. At the same time, he is pursuing a Master's Degree in Education, with a mention in Education Policies and Management at the University of San Martín de Porres, Lima, Peru.

So is he promoting Paulet to promote his movie?

The other sources cited in the WP article have been discussed here for years, the most complementary of which was written by "Sara Madueño" who "heads the Lima bureau of Executive Intelligence Review magazine in Peru and is a long-time political collaborator of international statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. She notes that this article is in payment of a long-standing debt to Megan Paulet, daughter of Pedro Paulet, and is written in memory of her own mother, Sara Paulet de Madueño, Pedro Paulet’s niece."

So seriously, I can see nothing new here, other than a self-promotion by someone with a stated financial and professional interest in increasing Paulet's renown by revising history at the expense of the scientists and inventors who actually did the work.

I am going to research and remove the unreliably sourced information. — UncleBubba ( T @ C ) 21:57, 26 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

False quotes[edit]

After reading through History of Rocketry & Space Travel I found no quote of "With his efforts, Paulet helped man to board the Moon" as claimed by El Comercio. Also a review of this source shows that yet again there is another reference to a LaRouchite publication (Executive Intelligence Review). I will be removing this. Jon698 (talk) 20:36, 18 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • I am doubtful about the Hermann Oberth pioneer claim so I'm going to buy the book later today to check it out. BBC is a reliable source, but it is not impossible for good sources to get things wrong especially in cases like this where there is so much misinformation floating around. We should prefer quotations directly from works written by the subject rather than people attributing quotes. The BBC article also does not give a source for the origin of this supposed quote and it does not exist in his known writings about Paulet. Jon698 (talk) 10:30, 7 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Jon698: Are you sure about the edition of the book you are reviewing? Some of the information you have removed has been properly sourced (and not related to LaRouche). Also, thanks for working with me on this. WMrapids (talk) 17:22, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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