When the New York Times Said Manned Flight Was a Million Years Away, How Quickly It Was Proved Wrong

One of my favorite themes over the years has been the unreliability of experts. You can read a batch of examples here in my 2007 blog post "Experts don't always know what they are talking about." Most of these examples are quite amusing. Would that all proclamations were  harmless and amusing.

Da Vinci's design for a flying machine.

Nevertheless, I just learned a new one about human flight, and I think you'll find this entertaining. 

In October 1903, the New York Times published one of the most famously wrong editorials in journalistic history. Titled “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,” it confidently declared that a practical flying machine would require “the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years.”

No doubt many people were thinking about manned flight in those days, in part stimulated by Jules Verne's fanciful 1886 sci-fi novel Robur the Conqueror (a.k.a. The Clipper of the Clouds) which featured a massive, propeller-driven heavier-than-air machine named the Albatross. 

Four centuries earlier Leonardo Da Vinci contemplated the possibilities of manned flight, so this was not an entirely new idea. What was new were the advances in technology that had been emerging over time.

So back to our story.

At the time, the most respected scientific authority on aviation in America was Samuel Pierpont Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Langley had conducted promising experiments with unmanned, steam-powered models. Impressed, the U.S. War Department gave him roughly $50,000 — a huge sum in 1903 — plus institutional backing from the Smithsonian to build a manned “Aerodrome.”

With Langley's prestige, funding, and the full weight of America’s scientific establishment behind it, the Aerodome was launched from a houseboat on the Potomac River. It promptly plunged into the water like a “handful of mortar,” as one observer put it. 

The pilot, Charles Manly, survived thanks in part to a cork jacket. (You can see one of these at Corktown here in Duluth, I believe.)

The New York Times jumped on the fiasco just two days later with its October 9 editorial. Langley’s very public failure was proof that powered human flight was essentially impossible in any reasonable timeframe. If the best-funded, most credentialed expert in the country couldn’t do it, the editorial implied, then who could?

Langley may have been humiliated, but to his credit he didn'quit. On December 8, 1903 Langley tried again. This time the Aerodrome collapsed during launch, its wings crumpling as it tumbled back into the river. Another high-profile disaster.

Kitty Hawk, December 17, 1903

Nine days later, on December 17, 1903, if you remember your history, at a windswept beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, achieved what the experts had declared would take millions of years. Orville and Wilbur Wright — self-taught bicycle mechanics with no formal scientific training, no government grants, and only a few hundred dollars of their own money — flew the first powered, controlled, sustained flight of a heavier-than-air machine.

They completed four flights that day. The longest lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. They built their own wind tunnel, designed a lightweight gasoline engine, and solved critical problems of control through relentless experimentation and iteration. They didn't have elite credentials or massive institutional funding. Just a "can do" persistence and practical ingenuity.

At its core, it’s a story about how elites and credentialed “experts” can mistake their own failures — or the limits of their approach — for the permanent boundaries of human possibility.

Langley had resources and prestige. The Wrights had grit and a willingness to question conventional wisdom. One approach crashed (literally). The other soared. Or sort of soared. For sure, they got off the ground and that was a start. As I write these words Artemis II is two-thirds of the way to the moon with four astronauts sharing the adventure of a lifetime. [Trivia: Did you know that Artemis, in Greek mythology, was the twin sister of Apollo?]

I'm surprised at how quickly the NYTimes rushed to declare the death of the dream (of manned flight) after the establishment’s golden boy failed, then had to watch these two nobodies from Ohio prove them wrong.

Lesson: Whenever you hear confident pronouncements from prestigious institutions that something is “impossible,” “decades away,” or “requires massive top-down funding and expertise,” remember the Wright brothers.

My main point remains: experts, even when earnest, don't always know what they are talking about. Add to this the reality that there are a lot of people with agendas who use the media to parade their "experts" in the service of those agendas. Don't be suckered. Learn to discern.

Ivory Towers and Pipe Dreams

"Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential."
~Ayn Rand

I began reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead yesterday and it brought to mind an art project from when I was in high school. Everyone was supposed to design a house. The picture on this blogspot is the house I designed.
(click image to enlarge)

It is a somewhat hilarious memory because... well, the design problems are self-evident. First off, try supporting half the house with a staircase. Something tells me there's going to be structural problems here. Yes, the upside-down pyramid is suspended in the air by the staircase running from the low portion of the house.

I would guess that if the structure were built in Minnesota, you might also have a problem with accumulating snow adding additional weight. Furthermore, from my observation living in the Northland, flat roofs are notorious for springing leaks over time. Leaky roofs are not a fun thing to deal with either.

But when the model you build is made of paper, and your only barrier is the imagination, a young person can dream up some pretty far out images. Just don't ask too many questions, like what would the re-sale value be? Or, what would a wife think of the amount of closet space here and the lack of windows?

An unrealistic hope or fantasy is known as a pipe dream, the origin of the phrase being an allusion to the stimulated imaginations of opium smokers. Many a business has crashed and burned because their product or process or service was ultimately a pipe dream. Like my house here, it may have been imaginative, but was decidedly not practical.

(This isn't to say that such a house could never be built. Or that the idea could not be modified to become a little more stable. For example, if the upside-down portion were supported by its tip, and thin rods made of some super-alloy supported the corners...)

In point of fact, much of what man has achieved is because he didn't allow his imagination to be restricted too much by reality based thinking. Da Vinci wrestled with the problems of flight, and must have been thought a kook by many. He was simply ahead of his time. The Wright brothers showed that gravity could be defeated. And today there are people with jet propelled suits doing solo flights that make the Wright brothers' contraption to be but a baby buggy.

While it's true that some ideas are created in ivory tower environs that have no possibility of practical implementation, it is also true that what seemed absurd from one point of view is quite astonishing from another.

So let the kids dream. Tomorrow it will be their world anyways.

Did She Really Disappear?

Celebritydom existed long before television. The brightness of Edison’s light still shines in America. Many others have carved out monument sized memories in the national consciousness. But in aviation, in the early decades of the twentieth century, there are really only a handful of superstars. with the Wright brothers, Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and perhaps Howard Hughes heading the list. No list is complete, however, without including the remarkable Amelia Earhart.

Perhaps her star shown with special brilliance because women were finally getting some recognition on the national stage. After her historic 1932 flight, as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, she became a media sensation.

In 1935 Earhart set her sights on one truly great adventure, a trip around the world in a twin engine Lockheed Electra. In 1937, along with navigator Frederick Noonan, Earhart set off to reinforce her superstar status. Tragically, her plane disappeared without a trace and she was never seen or heard from again. Or so the story goes.

This winter, Hillary Swank is slipping into the bigger than life role of Amelia Earhart to bring this woman’s achievements and heartbreaking end to the silver screen. Or at least one interpretation.

Another project has been underway, serving as the contrary yang to Swank’s ying. I am referring to researcher Tod Swindell’s efforts to assemble a documentary that seeks to tell the real Amelia Earhart story.

Swindell’s version of the story goes like this. Amelia Earhart was so uncomfortable with the media adulation she’d received for her cross-Atlantic flight and other successes, she simply had to come up with a creative solution that would enable her to re-establish a private life outside the public eye. The disappearance which took place in 1937 had been orchestrated over a two year period that would enable her to get all in place for a new, alternate identity.

It sounds pretty far out, until you allow Swindell to lay out his case. True, this theory has surfaced before and been rejected for various reasons. But Swindell claims that incontrovertible evidence has now emerged.

The success of Earhart’s escape down the gopher hole required complicity from other people in high places.

History produces cover ups like an untended garden produces weeds. And it is not uncommon for Hollywood to get the story wrong in an effort to tell a good story.

I’ve been in contact with Tod Swindell since first discovering and writing about the Amelia Earhart alternative story. (Burden of the Public Eye) Here is a short interview with Swindell as he strives complete the project which has been a burning passion of his over many years.

Ennyman: How long have you been involved with The Irene-Amelia story?
Tod Swindell: I have been involved with Earhart investigative research since 1991. She was my maternal Grandmother's hero. 'Gram' (Doris) told me Earhart stories as I grew up. (Doris was three years younger than Amelia, raised my mother and uncle alone.) So I grew up with an instilled interest.The website, www.irene-amelia.com is entirely mine. My two partners died in recent years. They were Joe Gervais and Rollin Reineck, WWII vets who I befriended in the mid 1990s, and came to love and admire greatly for their Earhart research achievements. The interesting thing, I find, is how even though it is obvious in a hidden historical sense, how Gervais was correct about his ID pin on the former Earhart in 1965, since WWII world society has been left to accept Earhart's loss as an everlasting mystery only. That is to say, historical dictum has done well to convince all the Gervais claim was a hoax, or an outright fraud, where in truth it makes great forensic historical sense, and if one does look into it with true objectivity, he or she realizes such a thing.

E: You’re currently producing a documentary on the Irene-Amelia story. How’s that coming along?
TS: I'm currently seeking funding to complete my documentary which is about 70% filmed. I have two French narrators, a man and a woman. The final documentary version will feature French voice over narration with English subtitles.

E: What is your marketing plan?
TS: To finish producing the film on Hi-Def with silent partnership, have a color print made, seek distribution while entering it in festivals, hopefully land a book contract and feature deal through said efforts. The deadline for Sundance entries is late October. But there are many, many festivals.

E: And how long is the documentary?
TS: 70 minutes.

E: How does it compare to Expelled or Michael Moore's stuff?
TS: I think it's a different animal, but it does shed some distrustful light on our national media and on our national historical dictum influences. As mentioned, it is to be narrated in French with English subtitles. I wanted it to sound like a foreign take an American historical issue.

E: Is it a made for TV documentary?
TS: Yes, but festival and four walls worthy, too.

E: Do you envision trying to get an Oscar on this project?
TS: Absolutely.

E: Ultimately, what’s you’re motivation here? What is it that drives you to go to these lengths to put your convictions out there like this?
TS: To me the truth is the truth and it cannot be changed, and I have a duty to share what I have learned and what I know. This was the point of building the website, and remains the point of still trying to complete the documentary. For the website begins to let the truth be told in a public sense, and the documentary should lead to the feature and book efforts. And yes, there is a script and a nice booklet presentation for the documentary.

If you get a chance, visit Swindell's Irene-Amelia website, dedicated to unveiling the curtain that has shrouded the Amelia Earhart story. Maybe we’ll never know the truth, or maybe we’re discovering it and find it simply too hard to believe. Earhart's disapperance certainly one of the great unsolved mysteries of the past eighty years. Where's Sherlock Holmes when you need him?

To learn more about this amazing woman, check out these two short YouTube videos.