Man Will Never Fly: How One Century Proved Every 'Impossible' Wrong

Every generation produces an expert standing at the front of the room, explaining patiently why the next thing cannot be done. And every generation, someone with far less authority and far less patience quietly goes and does it anyway. Push back through history far enough and that pattern stops looking like an exception. It starts looking like the actual mechanism by which anything gets invented at all: a confident, well-credentialed no, followed not long after by a demonstration to the contrary. No stretch of time shows that mechanism working faster, or stranger, than the hundred-odd years that ran from a foggy beach in North Carolina to a stage in San Francisco where a man held up a slab of glass and said it was three devices at once.

The newspaper that did the arithmetic

Start with the newspaper, because the newspaper actually did the maths, and showed its working, which is what makes it so much funnier than the average bad prediction.

On 7 October 1903, a distinguished astronomer named Samuel Langley tried to launch a machine he had spent a great deal of the United States government's money building, called the Aerodrome. It was catapulted off a houseboat on the Potomac River in front of assembled reporters, and it fell straight into the water like, in the memorable phrase of one witness, "a handful of mortar." It was Langley's second public failure in as many months, and it more or less ended his career.

Two days later, on 9 October 1903, the New York Times ran an editorial titled "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly," reflecting on Langley's collapse and on the whole idea of heavier-than-air flight. It did not simply say a flying machine was a long way off. It did the arithmetic. Birds, the editorial reasoned, had needed something like a thousand years of evolution to perfect flight starting from rudimentary wings, so a machine built by human effort, working from nothing, might reasonably be expected to take rather longer. Its conclusion, stated as sober fact rather than a joke: a workable flying machine "might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years."

That is not a rounding error. That is a newspaper of record putting a range on the calendar that starts at one million years.

The man who would do it did not believe it either

Here is the detail that makes the story better rather than worse for the Wright brothers: Wilbur Wright did not think the Times was being unreasonable. After a discouraging season of glider tests in 1901, tired and bitten half to death by mosquitoes at Kitty Hawk, Wilbur told his brother Orville that he doubted man would fly within a thousand years. He was not selling anything at the time. He was a bicycle-shop owner from Dayton, Ohio, privately unsure his own project would ever work, using almost exactly the same number the Times would later use in print.

That is worth sitting with. The most informed person on Earth on the subject of whether powered flight was possible, the person who would shortly prove it was, spent 1901 believing the pessimists were right.

Sixty-nine days

He was wrong faster than anyone alive at the time could have guessed, including himself. On the morning of 17 December 1903, on the sand near Kitty Hawk, Orville Wright lay down on the lower wing of a machine he and Wilbur had built from spruce, wire and a homemade engine, and flew it 120 feet through the air in twelve seconds. A local lifesaving-station volunteer named John T. Daniels, who had never touched a camera before that morning, was handed one and told to squeeze the bulb if anything happened. He caught the entire flight in a single frame, the one reproduced at the top of this article, almost certainly the most reproduced photograph in the history of aviation.

Sixty-nine days had passed since the New York Times set its lower bound at one million years. The Times did not run a correction. It simply never mentioned the Wright brothers' flight at all, not that week, not that year. The paper's own retrospective coverage, decades later, would treat this as one of the great embarrassments in its history.

From a beach to orbit

What happened next is the part that turns a good anecdote into the actual shape of a century. The gap between "impossible" and "obsolete" kept shrinking.

It took fifty-four years to go from a machine that flew twelve seconds over sand to a machine that left the atmosphere entirely. On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, a beach-ball-sized satellite that did nothing more than orbit the Earth and beep, and in doing so opened what is now simply called the Space Age. Sputnik did not fly for twelve seconds. It flew for three months, circling the planet every 96 minutes, transmitting a signal that amateur radio operators around the world could pick up on ordinary receivers, proof that the sky itself no longer had an edge.

From orbit to the Moon

Twelve years after that, the gap closed again. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the Moon while a Soviet skeptic and an American newspaper would once again have found reasons to say it should not yet be possible, a body 384,000 kilometres away, reached inside the same human lifetime that had watched a satellite merely orbit its own planet. Between a fragile machine falling into a river and two men standing on another world lies less time than a single working career.

A phone call to the rival lab

Pull the same thread forward again, out of orbit and into the pocket. On 3 April 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan sidewalk holding a prototype handheld cellphone the size of a brick, called his opposite number at Bell Labs, the rival team racing to build the same thing, and told him, with what by all accounts was considerable satisfaction, that he was calling from a real, portable, handheld phone. The device weighed over a kilogram and offered about thirty-five minutes of talk time before it died. It also did something no beach in North Carolina or beeping satellite ever had: it put the twentieth century's habit of doing the impossible directly into an ordinary person's hand, rather than a test pilot's or an astronaut's.

The device that ate all the others

The line runs straight from that sidewalk to a stage in San Francisco on 9 January 2007, where Steve Jobs told an audience that Apple was introducing three revolutionary products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. He said the names again, slower, then delivered the point of the whole routine. "An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. This is one device." The iPhone did not invent any of flight, orbit, or the phone call. What it did was fold every leap since 1903 into a single object that fits in a coat pocket, treating a century of "impossible" as a bundled, unremarkable feature list.

What a century actually looks like

Line the moments up and the shape of the century stops being a list of inventions and starts looking like a single repeating joke, told at the expense of whoever was most certain. A newspaper says one to ten million years; a bicycle mechanic proves it wrong in sixty-nine days. A satellite proves the sky has no ceiling; twelve years later two men are standing on the Moon. A phone the size of a brick proves a call can travel with no wire attached; thirty-four years later that same idea is quietly running the whole of human communication from a slab of glass in a pocket. Each leap made the next "impossible" claim look a little more foolish in advance, and did not make anyone stop making those claims.

None of this was inevitable, and none of it was smooth. Langley never flew, and never got over it. The Times never printed a word about being wrong. Whole careers, government budgets, and reputations were built on confidently getting the timeline off by a factor of tens of thousands. But the century did not care what the confident people said, and it never has. It is worth remembering, next time someone with real credentials explains patiently why the next thing is a long way off, that the sky, the Moon, and the phone in your pocket were all, at some point and by someone who should have known better, declared impossible on the record.

Sources

• Snopes, "Did the Wright Brothers Fly the Same Year the New York Times Said Flying Machines Could Take 10 Million Years to Develop?" (confirms and contextualizes the 9 October 1903 Times editorial and its "one to ten million years" estimate).
• Wikipedia, "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly" (the editorial's text, the Langley Aerodrome failure two days earlier, and the 69-day gap to Kitty Hawk).
• The Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company, "Not Within a Thousand Years" (Wilbur Wright's 1901 remark to Orville after a discouraging test season).
• Library of Congress, "John T. Daniels: Orville Wright's First Flight" (the photograph, its photographer, and the 17 December 1903 flight).
• NASA, "65 Years Ago: Sputnik Ushers in the Space Age" (Sputnik 1's 4 October 1957 launch).
• Wikipedia, "Apollo 11" (the 20 July 1969 Moon landing).
• NPR, "50 years ago, Martin Cooper made the first cellphone call" (the 3 April 1973 call to Bell Labs' Joel Engel).
• 9to5Mac, "15 years of iPhone: Rewatch the original Steve Jobs keynote" (the 9 January 2007 announcement and the "this is one device" quote).