Men Can't Fly
Nobody, except Leonardo Da Vinci thought flying machines were possible. Many people called the Wright Brothers foolish dreamers.
The Wright Brothers proved them all wrong. If Leonardo had had an internal combustion engine, men might have been flying in the Middle Ages. But until a day at the beach at Kitty Hawk North Carolina in 1903, everybody just knew that men couldn't fly.
Orville and Wilbur Wright took a new view of the possible and made flying machines a reality. Before long flying was commonplace, a fast and relatively safe way to travel long distances.
The great fighter aces of World War I like Eddie Rickenbacker and the Red Baron pushed their primitive planes to new hieghts of performance, and WWII drove the technology even further forward. The Corsair, P-38 Mustang, and the Japanese Zero took air combat to a new level. In many ways the one on one combat of the fighter aces resembled the jousting of medieval knights. The WWI pilots didn't even have parachutes, and their planes were made of cloth and wood. By the end of the Second World War planes were steel and could fly faster than the speed of sound.
Peacetime applications or wartime advances led to planes that could carry passengers and cargo faster and mostly as far as ships. It's just over a hundred years since that first powered airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, and human flight is taken for granted. People, goods, and ideas circle the globe with ease, carbon fiber offers the strength of steel with the lightness of wood and cloth promising future developments, and nobody says the Wright Brothers were foolish dreamers.
Of course, despite public opinion there were always a few who dreamed of human flight. Before there were the Wright Brothers there was Sir George Cayley, who was such an English Gentleman that he managed to remain respectable despite tinkering with the idea of flying machines, and the German engineer Otto Lilienthal the first man to make repeatable flights in a heavier than air craft, although it was a glider, not an airplane.
