4 ms·
To be fair to Kelvin, it was a reasonable opinion at the time: 1) Half of the aviation pioneers died trying. 2) The Wright brothers were truly overachievers,
by redis_mlc 6y ago
To be fair to Kelvin, it was a reasonable opinion at the time:
1) Half of the aviation pioneers died trying.
2) The Wright brothers were truly overachievers, devising a control system, early aviation engine (1903) and wind tunnel.
3) Producing light-weight, reliable and powerful aviation engines took over 20 years. The Atlantic crossing only became survivable after the Wright Brothers made the Whirlwind J-5 radial engine (1925):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_R-790_Whirlwind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_R-790_Whirlwind
For millennia, the pursuit of flying was about as successful as perpetual motion or alchemy.
What's interesting is that it was possible to make gliders for thousands of years. The secret ingredient is to glue fabric along the frame, not sew.
- garmaine 6y agoTo be fair to his critics: birds, bats, and bees exist.
- coldtea 6y agoHe didn't say things heavier than air can't fly. Just that we can't make them... (and at the time, we didn't have any success making them - we did however had great success with "lighter than air" air displacement vehicles, namely hot air balloons).
- garmaine 6y agoIf nature did it 3 times (more, we now know), it’s a bit presumptuous to say humans won’t be able to.
- froidpink 6y agoNature has created conscious beings. It would be a bit presumptuous to assume humans will be able to do so too
- whatshisface 6y agoConsciousness is clearly a different kind of problem than flight, for one thing it is possible to tell if something is flying buy not possible to tell if it is conscious.
- Ididntdothis 6y agoIt would be very presumptuous to categorically rule out that humans will create conscious beings. We don’t know how to do it yet but if nature did it, why wouldn’t we?
- garmaine 6y agoI disagree, but we've wandered off topic.
- kiba 6y agoAviation contemporaries made prototypes that either glide or flied powered, sometime poorly.