• tal@lemmy.today
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    8 months ago

    No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

    googles

    Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:

    Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909

    No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.