Stage whispers: The Tour de France
1 July, 2013Discovery Channel Magazine: watching an A380 come together
1 July, 2013Discovery Channel Magazine, July 2013
Not much more than a hundred years ago, “nobody on Earth believed that humans would ever be able to fly in heavier-than-air machines,” writes David Blatner in The Flying Book. Prominent scientists of the day proclaimed it impossible: better, they thought, to focus on balloons to get us around from city to city. “Their skepticism isn’t surprising: after all, to fly is perhaps humankind’s oldest dream, and several thousand years of failed attempts are likely to cause more than a bit of doubt.”
Yet eventually, of course, we cracked it, and when we did, we never looked back. Aviation took off – excuse the pun – in directions sometimes fanciful, sometimes pragmatic, but always unexpected from the perspective of our recent ancestors. As RG Grant writes in his definitive, Smithsonian-backed book Flight: “Human beings have always dreamed of flight. They did not, however, dream of the Boeing 747.”
Here, we list the five key moments in the development of flight.
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