No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
One of the Wright brothers said that. It’s actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we’re wrong about.
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.
Oh, and to provide numbers:
https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris
That’s 5,837.07 km.
As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).
That’s 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.
As for time:
No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping…
The longest flight by time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager
The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base’s 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.
Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it’s not really what he was thinking about as it’s launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.
“Brought in its train” what an interesting phrase, do people still say this? Is it the same as “in its wake” we use today?
He also isn’t talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.
At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC’s 640KB usable RAM limit: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.
It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.
Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.
*1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56594-6_11
