When you change the world and no one notices
collaborativefund.com
collaborativefund.com
That's why our society has such a short-term focus.
The brightest software engineers these days are writing essentially the same software over and over again (with very slight modifications).
I think the same can be said of almost any industry - All our intelligence and energy is spent on competing with each other and then using marketing/advertising to leverage tiny advantages in a product/service in order to win over disproportionate amounts of customers.
I think the reason why it takes years for disruptive innovations to get noticed is because marketing (and by extension, the media) is paid for by 'today money'.
Marketers don't take bets based on future prospects - They don't need to because there is so much financial incentive for them to stay in the present.
A present-day smartphone is obviously very, very different from Bell's first telephone, but on the other hand, there wasn't really a clear disruptive discontinuity anywhere along the string.
What makes it seem like a smooth transition is the length of time it takes to get to consumer products plus the need to seem like prior products. Internal combustion engines where around for a log time before being refined enough for portable power. But, heat engines are very much their own thing. Similarly battery's and capacitors are their own things. However, when you get a car it's got a huge range of such disruptions packaged into one thing.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not
imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They
laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed
at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the
Clown.
On the other hand there is a particular form of sneering dismissiveness that I see from a few people that I use as a guide. In the Bitcoin case all the right people were panning it so I grabbed a few for $11 each, that worked out well.
Columbus on the other hand, came up with his own calculations showing that the distance needed to get to India was actually manageable and that he could do it. His calculations were a joke, and off by an order of magnitude. Luckily for him, there happened to be an entirely unanticipated continent in between Europe and Asia, which he was able to land on. If not for that fortuitous stroke of luck, Columbus would have died on his expedition as a nobody, exactly as everyone has predicted.
The dude sailed boats in the unknown to give humanity new horizons. Who cares if he was wrong at the start.
This evidence is new in the same way that Steve jobs invented the point and click GUI
This is like winning the lottery and thinking you're a visionary businessman.
The (re)discovery of America in 1492 is arguably the most important discovery in history. It changed everything in very deep ways. Europe started looking outwards while Asia stayed looking inwards.
Come on man. He was much less clown-like than many, many, many of his contemporaries. He did something novel and pushed the world forward. Sorry he didn't do it in the manner you would have preferred.
> By [1499], accusations of tyranny and incompetence on the part of Columbus had also reached the Court. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand responded by removing Columbus from power and replacing him with Francisco de Bobadilla, a member of the Order of Calatrava. Bobadilla, who ruled as governor from 1500 until his death in a storm in 1502, had also been tasked by the Court with investigating the accusations of brutality made against Columbus. Arriving in Santo Domingo while Columbus was away in the explorations of his third voyage, Bobadilla was immediately met with complaints about all three Columbus brothers: Christopher, Bartolomé, and Diego. A recently discovered report by Bobadilla alleges that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola. The 48-page report, found in 2006 in the state archive in the Spanish city of Valladolid, contains testimonies from 23 people, including both enemies and supporters of Columbus, about the treatment of colonial subjects by Columbus and his brothers during his seven-year rule...Because of their gross mismanagement of governance, Columbus and his brothers were arrested and imprisoned upon their return to Spain from the third voyage. They lingered in jail for six weeks before busy King Ferdinand ordered their release. Not long after, the king and queen summoned the Columbus brothers to the Alhambra palace in Granada. There the royal couple heard the brothers' pleas; restored their freedom and wealth; and, after much persuasion, agreed to fund Columbus's fourth voyage. But the door was firmly shut on Columbus's role as governor. Henceforth Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres was to be the new governor of the West Indies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Accusatio...
Surely people have no clue how hard it is to make people laugh.
Humor and entertainment are very creative activities.
The Work of the Wright brothers was just one link in a causal chain with beginnings preceding them by over 250 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Primitiv...
* Sir George Cayley was first called the "father of the aeroplane" in 1846... Among his many achievements, his most important contributions to aeronautics include:
Conducting scientific aerodynamic experiments demonstrating drag and streamlining, movement of the centre of pressure, and the increase in lift from curving the wing surface.
* In 1871 Wenham and Browning made the first wind tunnel.
So no the Wrights didn't figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft and no it was not a first to use wind tunnel experiments.
Or maybe not?
>“In his Codex on the Flight of Birds, da Vinci discusses the relationship between the centre of gravity and the centre of lifting pressure on a bird’s wing. He explains the behaviour of birds as they ascend against the wind, foreshadowing the modern concept of a stall,” says Jakab. “He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the relationship between a curved wing section and lift. He grasps the concept of air as a fluid, a foundation of the science of aerodynamics. Leonardo makes insightful observations of gliding flight by birds and the way in which they balance themselves with their wings and tail, just as the Wright brothers would do as they evolved their first aeronautical designs." (http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2016/01/leonardo-da-vinci-l...) //
Under "Legacy":
[quote]
Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted.
— Wilbur Wright [21]
In September 1909, Orville Wright was in Germany making demonstration flights at Tempelhof aerodrome. He paid a call to Lilienthal's widow and, on behalf of himself and Wilbur, paid tribute to Lilienthal for his influence on aviation and on their own initial experiments in 1899.
[/quote]
You should also read about airfoil history: http://adg.stanford.edu/aa241/airfoils/airfoilhistory.html
Incidentally - I was not really intending on pointing to Lilienthal again, there are too many others, and the design later changed because it wasn't actually the best:
> Airfoils used by the Wright Brothers closely resembled Lilienthal's
> sections: thin and highly cambered.Which is a good related issue to the original point. Publicity, branding and PR is more important than being a good inventor.
We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot cheaper only in the past ~5 years.
1870 PV cells were a pretty piss poor energy source, the real revolution happened in the last 10 years when they started to become an economic competitor.
Unfortunately, SLA-based printers mostly suck and, unlike most software things, can't actually evolve to get better due to material constraints.
However, now that the SLS patents have expired, we're starting to see useful 3D printers at useful price points. Being able to print a robust plastic (nylon) and not having to worry about creating supports for narrow parts are big deals. Of course, SLS is a little less hobbyist friendly because of the powder handling.
TL;DW: It all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...).
Wilbur and Orville Wright made their historic first powered flight on December 17, 1903, from Kill Devil Hill in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The longest of four flights that day lasted 59 seconds and covered a distance of 852 feet. There were few witnesses to the flights and no reporters
This alone makes one wonder if they deserve the recognition they get. Many people made great personal sacrifices to publicly make a point related to flight or something else. Whereas the Wright brothers played their secret mission game, Traian Vuia carried his plane all over the Europe from Lugoj to Paris (using the transport infrastructure of that time, mind you) only to publicly show and test it. That obviously happened long after the incremental development of the plane itself, considering the repeated postpones due to financial constraints (as all the required expenses were pretty much his own).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
>> It is claimed Pearse flew and landed a powered heavier-than-air machine on 31 March 1903, some nine months before the Wright brothers flew their aircraft. The documentary evidence to support such a claim remains open to interpretation, and Pearse did not develop his aircraft to the same degree as the Wright brothers, who achieved sustained controlled flight. Pearse himself never made such claims, and in an interview he gave to the Timaru Post in 1909 only claimed he did not "attempt anything practical ... until 1904".
People just do not notice things. If you want, try asking some non geek if people ever landed a robot on a comet or asteroid.
At last, they had a minimum viable product. In 1907 they came out with the Wright Model A, which was the production version of the improved Flyer III. This had a range of 125 miles, and was the first production aircraft.
"Santos-Dumont later added ailerons, between the wings in an effort to gain more lateral stability. His final design, first flown in 1907, was the series of Demoiselle monoplanes (Nos. 19 to 22). The Demoiselle No 19 could be constructed in only 15 days and became the world's first series production aircraft."
So it looks like the Wright Model A was not the first production aircraft.
RC Planes and helicopter POV footage was great to enjoy on YouTube, but the learning curve was so immense that it kept the mainstream market away.
Maybe that was the problem. They weren't the first to conquer the sky. People had been flying in hot air balloons for 120 years by that point. By 1903, getting people up into the sky was old-hat. Sure, they did it in a different way, but what they demonstrated was--strictly speaking--inferior to the technology that was already available. If you wanted to get up into the clouds in 1903, you weren't going to use a Wright Brothers machine that would only let you skip along the ground for a few minutes at a time, you'd use a hot air balloon and stick around for a while. Can people really be blamed for missing the fact that heavier-than-air flight would be able to travel much faster and farther than balloons?
Nowadays, the process might take a lot lot less time than before though (http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...)
And also - let's remember that it's not because something goes through the first steps of this seven-step path that it will become a breakthrough.
And then once you have a machine that can do this, well you can start to consider routing, and telegraphing straight into homes, and having telegraph services that store information that can be access remotely...
It took until the telephone to reach the average person's home. And telephones are much more sophisticated than just sending blips over a wire. They had much higher bandwidth. And there was much greater complexity involved in wiring up everyone's house, then a crude automated routing telegraph machine would require, I think.
Routing was a thing, but there were some limitations of how many communications could happen at the same time on the same wire (Baud was the one who actually worked on that), making scaling difficult.
The important thing to understand is at the end of the century, as bandwidth, infrastructure scaling, reliability were all getting better, the phone happened, as a logical next step. The telegraph never made is as a personal device because the infrastructure and the science of the telegraph reached a point where phones were possible.
Morse for original mechanism, Baud for scaling, Bell to use voice instead of beeps.
That's in part because everyone was googly-eyed over managed funds thanks to Peter Lynch's 29% average annual return for the Magellan Fund from '77 to '90. Index funds didn't beat that dude.
For example, people had been imagining flying for millennia before the Wright brothers. Leonard da Vinci had drawn hang-gliders and helicopters hundreds of years before and there was the myth of Icarus thousands of years before that. Our distant ancestors even "flew" through the trees. People also have flying dreams, before they've even flown in reality and they probably had flying dreams thousands of years ago too. It's not a new idea so no wonder people weren't that amazed when the Wright brothers flew. There are never any truly new ideas, only remixes and hybrids of existing ones, e.g. Relativity was Einstein's synthesis of ideas from (among others) Poincaré and Lorentz and you can trace their ideas back too.
When Wright brothers did their test, planes were already flying thanks to the innovation of lots of other people.
But planes could fly without control and crashed. A solution was needed and the Wright brothers provided it expending very little money: flexing the wings.
The fact that they could come with the first valid solution provides a lot of value for society, in the same way of solving the nuclear problem by slowing the neutrons with heavy water(a crazy idea from a single guy) gave America an advance over the Germans.
The same could be said about the problems yet to solve: who will make the first viable fusion nuclear reactor?
It has to be noted that while the Wright brothers invented flexing the wings, they did not invented ailerons, but a twisting mechanism that was not practical, but they were awarded a patent anyway on them for several reasons ( American protectionism being one of them).
Those patents make America aviation industry lag behind other nations and forced the Government to act.
It's not hard to imagine going to Mars and live there, or even have a bunch of theories on how this would be possible in practice. Doing it however, takes a lot more than that.
I can't imagine current media completely ignoring this when it would actually take place, which basically did happen with the Wright brothers.
Ideas and theories only prove their worth when something practical is done with them.
You are indeed correct that not all ideas (or theories) are easy. I think in the case of flight the practicality dominates the theories because they have to be combined just right to actually work.
Whereas your example of relativity, it's indeed the theory that is the hardest part (and Einstein got the proper recognition for that, not the one who practically applied it).
Going to make a weird comparison here, but it's basically like a chicken coming out of an egg. We only see an egg at one moment, and the next there is a chicken coming out. We don't really notice there has been a lot of stuff going on within the egg a long time before it came out. Seems the same as with innovations or discoveries. Suddenly it seems to be there.
But I stand corrected that it's not always the practical application that dominates, sometimes it's indeed the theory that is the biggest achievement.
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers?items_per_page=...
For those interested in clement ader : https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ole_(avion)
[1] Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm
Congress were actually rather insightful in these predictions. Millions now die every year from motor vehicle accidents and air pollution.
For true innovation to happen, what we need are brave investors.
> When innovation is measured generationally, results shouldn’t be measured quarterly.
Basically, it all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt. SV and all its firms stand on foundations laid by (very) big and (very) generous government.
Investors ant at least statistical certainty, meaning while they of course account for most of their venture companies to fail they want to at least be certain for them all as a group. They won't finance a "business" that is just experimental with no advance idea what the whole thing is even about. Because such basic research isn't a business.
I once worked for a startup that was eventually sold for a few hundred million (no I did not benefit from that). We got funded (by the tens of millions) - by Silicon Valley venture capital - because we were #2 in a market where the #1 just had an incredible IPO. We did exactly the same as the #1, and #1 also didn't actually do anything innovative, just a different version of what had already been in this world for decades, technology not all that superior to existing things, the changes were in the business model mostly. "Predictable" innovation.
Here's an example:
Imagine someone would try to get venture capital for a human-computer interface right into the brain. I'm taking about something out of a sci-fi movie, not based on the extremely basic steps we've thus far taken. Would they get funding? Never. It's tens of billions of investment and it's completely uncertain if it would take 10 or 100 years. This isn't a well-defined research project, this is very broad.
Now imagine a serious threat to the United States - war, and not just one of those little ones abroad. Would the US government fund such a crazy idea? Sure, just like they've done many times. They will throw (non-existing) billions at this and at many other crazy ideas without asking for potential monetary return.
While an investor wants a statistical chance that the overall portfolio has a positive monetary return, the government (at war) wants a statistical chance for a positive result - non-financial, not caring, actually expecting, that costs will by far exceed returns. If the stuff created in such an effort eventually creates businesses that's nice but not even part of the motivation. When they paid for the Manhattan project, the Norden bomb sight, or electronics and computing R&D they didn't stop to think about if that would ever create a financial return.
Or investors.
I'm still waiting for the ridiculously cheap, extremely high density write-once laser storage on adhesive transparent Tesa film. There was a working prototype already more than a decade ago, they funded a spin-off company, and since then nothing seems to have happened.
Extremely bendable e-ink-like displays at throwaway-pricing were also promised to me more than ten years ago.
My personal explanation is that many good inventions are bought by the competition and then quickly hidden in the drawers, because not every technology that is better than before allows the company who owns it to also make more money than before. Or many of these inventions are just bogus marketing speech to attract investors and they really don't work.
I admire Wrights thoroughly for their vision, hard work and making miracle happen through their miger resources but saying that no one would have noticed if they saw first airplane in air is bogus.
Reference: https://www.amazon.com/Wilbur-Orville-Biography-Brothers-Tra...
I just think it's interesting how difficult it is to see good ideas when they haven't been invented yet. And how easy it is to relentlessly pursue bad ideas.
Modern fighter planes are unstable, but are stabilized by computers, not the pilot.
When I've read it I knew I had to take all the rest with a big grain of salt :|
I don't quite see that since the author dates the quote to 20 years before Ford's popularisation of automobiles, he obviously couldn't have been the inventor of something being investigated by a congressional committee long before his age.
Then again, the "report" is an anachronistic piece of fiction: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp
No need to convince anybody since Ford started manufacturing and commercializing cars roughly 10 years after his peers in Europe.
Closer to 20 and he was neither pioneer of production-line manufacturing (that was Olds) nor of US car manufacturing (that's Duryea followed by Studebaker). The something he was on to was the moving assembly line (where the posts are fixed and the assembly moves around), inspired by slaughterhouse butchery lines.
If you look at the quote then this interpretation makes more sense IMO - the quote clearly considers the position that cars were being made commercially 20 years before Ford.
TL;DR the Ford point is he democratised car use in the face of congress's earlier consideration that such widespread use would kill agriculture and people. (Mind you the congress memo quote seems pretty right on).
IIRC Olds already had a one-job production line, but the line was static and workers had to move around between assemblies. Ford's innovation was to make the workers "static" (with well laid out workspaces) and move the assembly between the jobs.
The author is talking about product innovation, all the examples are on people who invented famous products.
When he says : "Twenty years before Henry Ford convinced..".
Well the congress's statement is from 1875, 20 years later the first cars appeared. Ford came 10 years later. The event he's referring to is clearly the car invention
It's quite obvious that he's presenting Ford as the inventor of the car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Electric
I am sure you are right about steam being the expected winner, but gosh the past is a complex place!
I wonder if there are any other good examples of technologies that had explosions in different technical approaches to the problem before becoming more standardised?
I believe that this was not true for Santos-Dumont[1] though. I wonder if he had more media coverage at the time.
Wrong! One of them was Traian Vuia, struggling with financial difficulties which significantly delayed both the plane development and its final public demonstration in Paris! Other not so wealthy pioneers are Percy Pilcher, Lawrence Hargrave, Samuel Franklin Cody, Otto Lilienthal, Aurel Vlaicu, and many others.
Absolutely untrue. The Wright Brothers brought their breakthrough into the market in a big way, becoming a (not the only) major manufacturer of commercially available, working, reliable aircraft.
True, they fought patent battles, and in the end their reliance on wing warping (covered well by their patents) held them back when it became clear that ailerons were the way foreward - but they certainly were more than just experimental researchers. They truly did usher in the age of practical, heavier-than-air flight.
Wait, what? index funds invention on par with flying?
Oh, "collaborativefund.com" ...
What's your 'watch this space'? What technologies currently in prototype stage do you think have a bright future?
It's supposed to be an inspirational quote to keep you motivated when it feels like the whole world is against you, but whenever I see it used (on online forums at least) it's always by someone who seems to think that it not only has predictive power, but it somehow illustrates the inevitability of the total dominance of desktop Linux (or whatever they're insisting is inevitable).
I've seen that quote so preposterously misused over the last 20 years, over and over and over again as a form of argumentation, that I fear it's lost all meaning at this point. :(
That was quite prescient! Unfortunately we didn't do that, and cars took over the streets, caused millions of deaths and injuries, and indeed poisoned our atmosphere.
> The cost of producing gasoline is far beyond the financial capacity of private industry…
Check the history of subsidies to the oil industry http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-en...
> In addition the development of this new power may displace the use of horses,
Obviously.
> which would wreck our agriculture.
Probably this was wrong. Instead it got transformed and made more efficient. They didn't foresee the tractor, the tresher, etc.
This is a lesson about the impossibility of thinking in advance about even the major consequences of new technologies. You get some, you miss others, so it's difficult to decide if you'll be better off.
Edit: the report turned out to be fake (see noobermin's comments). It was written in 1950 as satire, when it was spot on but too late to stop cars. A lesson about checking sources.
Best.
This quote is a well-known hoax: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp
Never mind that so many had made claims about flight before the Wrights, that having the press be less than interested was to be expected.
Every point is incorrect / misleading and the 'point' is the direct opposite of reality.
People latch onto new amazing we'll change the world ideas to easily.
Real change happens from hard work and gradual change is the real reality.
Real change has also happened from "spur of the moment" ideas and inventions. There's no "system" the world operates on. Sometimes it takes hard work, sometimes it's a random neuron firing....
The first time I used Google I knew it was amazing and never used altavista again. When Facebook came to my campus it spread like wildfire.
These stories are quite interesting but at the same time what are they suggesting? An investor wants you to spend your whole life chasing a dream because they don't care if it fails and get paid if it succeeds. If you love doing something, do it regardless of what people think. But don't let an investor convince you to waste years working on something that nobody wants because that is what all successful entrepreneurs do. In a few cases it works out but the vast majority of the time it doesn't.
Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.
It's not that every huge shift is also accompanied by a lengthy doldrums. Uu chose clear outliers-and yes while VC is predicated on outliers this post is actually a counter balance to what VC mostly decide on which is traction. So I'm not so cynical about this post because it's not saying " do what sales" and all the other typical VC tropes which are more in line with what you describe. Most successful entrepreneurs do something incremental so I think your analysis is wrong there as well.
The only problem I see with this post is that more than likely, they don't actually invest on this ethos so it's giving entrepreneurs with vision a false hope.
But that doesn't apply to Google. Although there were many, many search engines when Google first appeared, none worked like it -- in fact, none worked, at all.
Google worked from day 1 and everyone who used it, saw it very clearly.
Google was initially much better on simple queries, but not competitive with "expert" users who knew how to use Altavista's query operators properly, or who were familiar with metasearch engines when looking for very specific material.
Google succeeded because they were similar enough that it was easy to try them, but met resistance because they were different enough that for a portion of the user base it was not clear that the advantages they had on simple queries was worth it.
The superiority of their approach first became "universally" clear as the number of pages exploded and tweaking your queries became an exercise in frustration, coupled with the explosion of users not familiar with how to compose a more specific query.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who took a long time to switch to Google from the first time we tried it because other search engines worked better for us at the time.
This too is a common pattern: Early adopters get so caught up in specifics of early products that when an evolution of the concept arrives that has profound impact on usability, it gets met with a shrug or dismissed because it doesn't fit into the usage patterns those early adopters have learnt in order to overcome the limitations of earlier products.
Often something will look like a step back for the expert users making up the bulk of users of its predecessors (because you either become an expert user, or give up), and first gains traction by expanding the market to users for whom the features who look like flaws to the former group is what makes the product usable to them at all.
E.g. I remember early PDA adopters being dismissive of the iPhone on-screen keyboard, because it was "pointless": Grafitti worked so much better on a small screen.... for those of us who had spent a couple of years or more learning how to write fast with it. For everyone else, the iPhone keyboard made it usable in ways Palm devices weren't.
I certainly switched at the time but I thought it's first results were comparable to dogpile, which was my go-to search at the time.
It's disingenuous to suggest that the very first moment something has been shown in a proof of concept should be the moment that everyone starts rejoicing and flocking to it en masse. Many technologies need years or decades to get mature enough for wide spread use (which the author seems to equate with 'getting recognition').
And by 2016, 6 hours still.
http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/new-york/to/los-ang...
http://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2011/01/the-greatest...
...try millennia!
The aeolipile, regarded as a curious novelty (a 'temple wonder'), created by Heron of Alexander in 1st century AD was the first steam turbine... the eventual mastery of which led to the industrial revolution.
Some inventions seem to take long to gain traction - yes. Others though (how many compared to the first set?) gain traction immediately (e.g. lots of inventions in medicine or lots of inventions in -ehm- IT). Others still don't get on ever.
There is no easy moral here. We could derive some statistics if we had all data or some teachings per story. How your invention will be treated by the near or far future is not just a matter of newspapers and general public interest.
PS: Also -as I read in commends here- the main point seems bogus too as Wrights themselves were extra secretive about their experiments.
From Altair to IBM PC, 7 years, Mac, only 10. From IBM Simon to the iPhone fueled boom in 2008 only 14 years passed.
Is this just one way to do it or is it what every scientist do? How can you possibly englobe everybody to a cause for certain trait based on studying 100,1000, or even 100,000? I can't get my mind atound this.
1903. First flight, ignored.
1904. Nameless hot-air-balloon-flying count dismisses possibility of flying machines.
1905. People see Wrights flying around Dayton.
1906. Passing mention of Wrights in NYT.
1908. Reporters sent to observe Wrights, credence given.
1930s. NYC LAX: 17 hours.
1950. NYC LAX: 6 hours.
This story is a lie. I don't mean that it contains anything actually false (as far as I know, it doesn't) but it is actively and intentionally misleading by its selective omission of facts. Although the rumors were eagerly repeated, people generally didn't believe the Wrights had built a flying machine because the Wrights refused to demonstrate it. Then, when other people started building airplanes, they started suing them. Consequently, the US lost its leadership in aviation to France (and Brazil!) for over a decade, which would have been a longer period of time if France hadn't been devastated by the Great War.
Here are some of the omitted events from the timeline.
1896. People fly in Octave Chanute's biplane hang glider.
1900. Wrights begin glider experiments at Kitty Hawk at Chanute's suggestion.
1901. Wrights lecture in Chicago on their glider experiments, and in particular wing-warping control, at the invitation of Chanute, who lives there.
1902. Wrights continue glider experiments, visited by Chanute.
1903. Wrights apply for wing-warping patent.
1903. Wrights' first four flights, of 12 to 59 seconds. Airplane irreparably damaged immediately post-flight. Several newspapers report the event, inaccurately, from a leak by a telegraph operator. Dayton Daily News disbelieves tall tale, doesn't report.
1904. Wrights issue public statement, build new airplane, invite reporters to first flight attempt on the condition that no photos be taken. Attempt fails. Further dozens of test flights are undertaken in strict secrecy, except for eyewitness accounts published in a beekeeping magazine. Longest flight exceeds five minutes. Airplane destroyed.
1905. Wrights continue tests witnessed by a small circle of friends. Longest flight is 38 minutes. Scientific American doubts the alleged experiments happened. Dayton Daily News reports "The Flight of a Flying Machine." Wrights end experiments, refuse to fly any more without some buyer signing a contract to buy an airplane. Governments of US, Britain, France, and Germany (!) refuse to sign contracts without a demonstration.
1905. Aéro-Club de France and other organizations federate in the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
1906. Paris edition of New York Herald asks of Wrights, "FLYERS OR LIARS?"
1906. Santos-Dumont makes a powered heavier-than-air flight in Bagatelle Field in Paris, certified by Aéro-Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
1906. Wrights make 0 flights.
1906. Wrights receive patent on wing-warping control techniques they derived from Chanute's work.
1907. Wrights make 0 flights.
1908. The Clement-Bayard company in Paris starts a production run of airplanes of Santos-Dumont's design; 100 planned, 50 built, 15 sold.
1908. Wrights finally sign a contract. Make first public demonstration in Le Mans, France. Make first passenger flight. Airplane destroyed in crash. Wilbur emerges from wreckage with cut on nose.
1908. Glenn Curtiss starts making airplanes with ailerons to avoid the Wrights' wing-warping patent.
1909. Curtiss sells an aileron plane; Wrights begin suing him and basically everything that moves, including foreign aviators who visit the US.
1909. Clement-Bayard planes are sold with a choice of Clement or Wright engines.
1909. Wrights form the Wright Company.
1910. German court rules Wrights' patent invalid due to their disclosure of wing-warping in 1901.
1910. Wrights stop working on airplane design and switch to working full-time on suing other airplane designers.
1910. Octave Chanute publicly deplores Wrights' secrecy and litigiousness. Dies.
1912. Wilbur Wright dies of typhoid.
1913. Wrights win lawsuit against Curtiss.
1915. Orville Wright quits the company.
1917. US enters World War I, has no domestically produced airplanes of acceptable quality due to Wright-initiated patent battles; US forces fly French airplanes. US government forces aircraft companies to enter a cross-licensing cartel.
Kids, don't be like the Wright Brothers. Be like Chanute. Be like Santos-Dumont. Change the world, don't try to own it.
That's sort of how exponential growth works. The growth in the most recent period makes all the other growth before it look trivial. I bet if he could zoom in on the '75 to '95 period he could plot the arrows in the same place and draw the same conclusion.
Photovoltaic cells aren't becoming popular now because people are suddenly realizing that they exist; they're becoming popular because the technology has reached the point where the cells are cheap enough and efficient enough to be practical. The same goes for 3D printing, and the same went for the Wrights' aircraft: They received plenty of attention once they moved from the realm of curiosities to being useful inventions.
The title of this article should be "when you don't change the world and no one notices".
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/15/how-expiring-patents-are-u...
Note: But even for a younger audience, I would do some serious editing of the text (e.g. misuse of "concurred" instead of "conquered" etc.) before publication.
Those of us who are not suffering that disability should not feel guilty for our capabilities, but we should recognize that we are intellectually superior, because we should be ruling the world from every corner, not them. Sadly, many of them are the ones running governments and giant corporations.
All men may be created equal, but through different educational and parental environments, all men do not arrive at adulthood as equals.