The Wright Brothers Defeated Gravity & The Government Machine
“Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000, a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.” ― David McCullough, The Wright Brothers
In our modern age, one would have to admit we’re spoiled. We book flights without putting much thought into the machines that carry us from one location to the next. We order Christmas gifts on Amazon by next day air shipping, not thinking of the engineering necessary to get that Elmo doll from Seattle to New York within a day. The air is a just a place we humans go to get to our next destination.
However, this was not always so. In a not so distant past, the sky was home to birds and only a place humans wished to be. Gods and heroes of antiquity took to the sky, but that was it. Balloons had been used to some degree with limited effect. But, the air was a place that only accepted human kind in the form a dream. In the practical world the sky was a place we didn’t belong.
