Page 176 - Psychology of Money - Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

There are lots of overnight tragedies. There are rarely overnight miracles.

COBACOBA
On January 5th, 1889, the Detroit Free Press pushed back against the long-
held dream that man could one day fly like a bird. Airplanes, the paper
wrote, “appear impossible”:

The smallest possible weight of a flying machine, with the necessary fuel
and engineer, could not be less than 300 or 400 pounds … but there is a low

limit of weight, certainly not much beyond fifty pounds, beyond which it is
impossible for an animal to fly. Nature has reached this limit, and with her
utmost effort has failed to pass it.

Six months later, Orville Wright dropped out of high school to help his
brother, Wilbur, tinker in their backyard shed to build a printing press. It
was the brothers’ first joint invention. It would not be their last.

If you had to make a list of the most important inventions of the 20th
century, the airplane would be at least top five, if not number one. The
airplane changed everything. It started world wars, it ended world wars. It
connected the world, bridging gaps between cities and rural communities;
oceans and countries.

But the story of the Wright Brothers’ quest to build the first plane has a

fascinating twist.

After they conquered flight, no one seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to
care.

In his 1952 book on American history, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote:

Several years went by before the public grasped what the Wrights were
doing; people were so convinced that flying was impossible that most of
those who saw them flying about Dayton [Ohio] in 1905 decided that what