From hallucination to reality with incremental advances

By David E. Brody

Thomas Jefferson was not only the author of the Declaration of Independence, the third president of the United States, and an esteemed statesman, he was also an educator, an architect, and an inventor.  He designed a more efficient plow, a revolving book stand, a mechanical dumb waiter, a coding device for secret messages, a unique clock that also displayed the day of the week, and several other inventions.  Like other inventors, Jefferson generally improved upon or adapted items or ideas already in existence.  So when he wrote the following to Benjamin Waterhouse, the American physician who co-founded Harvard Medical School, in a letter dated March 3, 1818, Jefferson was reflecting on his own experience.

The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.

Three transformational inventions that impacted all of humankind beginning in the 20^th century – the automobile, airplane, and computer – evolved through the process Jefferson described and they share a common characteristic with each other.   In fact, most basic scientific theories of natural phenomena and most inventions that have transformed society over the past few centuries went through a process of small advances that took place over decades or centuries.  They culminated in scientific discoveries that proved to be accurate facts and principles (such as evolution and the Big Bang) or they developed from an original vision or idea into inventions that actually worked (such as the inventions discussed below).  

In Walter Isaacson’s national best-seller, The Innovators, he points out, “Visions without execution are hallucinations.”  This applies to almost everything we do in life, including business and creative endeavors.  Failure provides valuable lessons about what to do and not to do next time, but without ultimate success, there are only hallucinations.  The slow process that I’m calling “Incremental Advances” turns hallucinations into ideas.  That process is also counter-intuitive because transformational inventions seem to appear suddenly, out of nowhere: the automobile in the early 1900s, the airplane in 1903, the personal computer beginning in the 1970s, the internet in the 1990s, the smart phone in 2007, and artificial intelligence in the 2020s.  But the truth is that these inventions began with a concept or idea and had to wait decades or centuries before technology caught up with that concept or idea in order to become a reality.  

The idea for the automobile dates back to 1672 when the first steam-powered vehicle was invented by Ferdinand Verbiest, a Jesuit missionary.  The vehicle was too small to carry a driver, but it was the first working steam-powered vehicle.  In 1770, the French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was the first to demonstrate a steam-powered self-propelled vehicle large enough for people and cargo — an experimental steam-driven artillery tractor.

It took Carl Benz’s invention of a car in 1886 with a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine to make the automobile a reality.  It’s also a little known fact that the idea and most of the basic technology for the airplane was developed in the mid-1800s, not by the Wright Brothers in 1903.  Similar to the automobile engine, the main physical component needed to provide power for the airplane to fly – a light internal combustion engine – only became available shortly before the Wright Brothers decided to take on that enormous challenge.  And the same applies to the computer.  The basic concept of the modern computer was first developed in England in the 1830s.  But it would remain an idea until the first vacuum tubes were invented in the 1930s, and enabled British code breakers to build the “Colossus” series of computers during World War II that broke the German encryption and helped end the war.  Vacuum tubes were then superseded by the invention of the transistor in the ‘50s.  With Intel’s invention of the affordable tiny microchip in the 1960s, hundreds of products were made possible and became ubiquitous across the globe.

   The phenomenon of Incremental Advances is shared by major inventions and technological developments throughout history: Concepts or ideas often precede the actual invention by decades or centuries, followed by incremental discoveries and advances in technology – improvements to existing technology which enable those concepts and ideas to become reality.  Knowledge accumulates until the concept or idea can be transformed into a working machine, a new invention.  The groundbreaking invention finally bursts into our lives and suddenly makes the world a different place.  Not necessarily a better or safer place, as many such inventions are first adopted by a nation’s military – including aggressors, terrorists, and other enemies — and used to multiply deadly force.

Throughout history, major scientific discoveries of natural phenomena follow that same path of Incremental Advances that applies to inventions: Knowledge is gained in small increments as a result of research and experiments that become possible as a result of inventions and improvements to existing technology and equipment.  For example, the microchip, telescope, microscope, refineries, and metallurgical processes, all developed over time.  That new technology and equipment enabled scientists to test their theories more effectively and provided them with improved materials that spurred the advancement of even more equipment that allowed for even more accurate measurements.  Those advances led to major new scientific discoveries as well as new inventions, such as the invention of the telescope by the Dutch spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey in 1608.  Lippershey tried to sell his device to the government of Holland as a military instrument for its war against Spain.  The Venetian Senate was also interested in buying a telescope for military use, so in July 1609, during Galileo’s tenure as a professor at the University of Padua, the government of the Venetian Republic recruited him to try to improve on Lippershey’s invention.  Though sometimes given credit for inventing the telescope, Galileo’s contribution was to greatly improve the telescope, not to invent it.  Within just a month, Galileo developed a version of the telescope for Venice that was three times more powerful than any in existence, and a few months later he was able to again triple the power beyond his previous one.

In 1609, Galileo turned his powerful device toward the heavens, which changed history.  He discovered remarkable heavenly objects never before seen by anyone.  Similarly, the discovery of cells and the germ theory in biology would not have been possible without the invention of the microscope in 1665, followed by major improvements to that invention over the centuries, culminating in the Transmission Electron Microscope which can magnify up to 50 million times.  

Incremental Advances and the Analytical Engine

In The Innovators, Walter Isaacson recounts the fascinating history of the development of the modern computer and the development of the internet.  In Bletchley Park, north of London, during World War II a group of British codebreakers developed the world’s first programmable computer.  As I mentioned, this invention was the key to breaking the Nazi’s Enigma code and intercepting radio messages of the German High Command.  However, the concept for the modern computer didn’t originate at Bletchley Park in the 1940s or in Silicon Valley in the 1970s.  It began in the 1820’s and ‘30s in London.  Charles Babbage, the British mathematician and mechanical engineer, imagined and described the basic principles and concept of what was to eventually become the modern computer over a hundred years later.  He imagined what such a machine might be able to do and attempted to build one.  “Babbage wanted to construct a mechanical method for tabulating logarithms, sines, cosines, and tangents.”  As Isaacson explains, Babbage developed a system by which “even complex mathematical tasks…could be broken into steps that came down to calculating ‘finite differences’…Babbage devised a way to mechanize this process, and he named it the Difference Engine.”

With substantial funding from the British government beginning in 1823, Babbage built a number of mechanical Difference Engine contraptions with cranks and shafts that could tabulate complex mathematical problems.  He came up with a much improved version in 1834 which he named the Analytical Engine.  Building on different inventions from preceding decades for automating the manufacturing of intricately woven silk tapestry and for clothing, Babbage’s Analytical Engine employed punch cards which allowed for an unlimited number of instructions to be input, and which were easily reprogrammable.  Those punch cards were the precursors of the IBM computer punch cards that were in widespread use by “word processors” in thousands of companies in the late 1970s and into the ‘80s for typing and saving documents electronically.

Ada Lovelace, daughter of the famous British poet Lord Byron, was an expert mathematician and a follower and admirer of Babbage.  When she heard about the Analytical Engine she contacted Babbage and asked if she could assist him in further developing the machine.  Advancing Babbage’s concept well beyond mathematical calculations, she wrote a detailed technical paper about the Analytical Engine in 1843 in which she envisioned a machine that could not only process numbers, but also symbolic notations – a machine that could store, manipulate, and process anything that could be expressed in symbols, including musical and artistic ones.  Lovelace told Babbage,

The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere calculating machines.  It holds a position wholly on its own.  In enabling a mechanism to combine together general symbols, in succession of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental process.

Isaacson noted that Lovelace envisioned the essence of the modern computer, as described in those sentences.  Babbage and Lovelace were a hundred years ahead of their time because the technology and materials necessary to construct a computer capable of performing the functions that they envisioned didn’t exist yet.  The British electrical engineer, physicist, and inventor Sir John Fleming invented the vacuum tube in 1904.  The vacuum tube enabled “logic circuitry” necessary for operation of the first modern computer.  The remaining technology and materials that made the computer feasible were not developed until the 1930s.  Prompted by the demands of World War II, Britain desperately needed a means to gather intelligence more effectively against the Nazis and particularly decipher their communication codes being used by the German U-boat submarines.  Those subs were destroying Allied war ships and commercial shipping bringing supplies from Canada and the U.S. to the U.K. and other Allied areas in Europe.  The German subs were taking thousands of naval men and civilians down along with those supplies.

Working for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking center, Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician and computer scientist, made significant leaps in computer technology beginning in 1941.  Along with British engineer Tommy Flowers and many others, they deciphered the encrypted German codes, which led to pre-empting most of the U-boat attacks.  Turing developed the first programmable, electronic, digital computer, known as the “Turing machine” and was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, including the concept of algorithms and computation.  Turing’s electronic digital computers used thousands of vacuum tubes in each computer, making each of them the largest vacuum-tube system ever built.  In the October 1950 edition of the philosophy journal MIND, published by Oxford University Press, Turing wrote a famous article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, addressing artificial intelligence.  Based on his extensive work, writings, and scientific contributions, Alan Turing is considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. 

He and his WWII accomplishments were the subject of a feature film in 2014, The Imitation Game.  Despite Turing’s tremendous work in advancing the computer, saving thousands of lives, and helping to end the war, he was never fully recognized in his home country during his lifetime due to his homosexuality, which was then a crime in the UK.  He died of cyanide poisoning in 1954, at the age of 41, which most historians have concluded was a suicide.

In the 1950s, transistors replaced vacuum tubes.  Thousands of other discoveries and Incremental Advances from the 1950s through the ‘90s enabled the development of the modern small, lightweight, and incredibly powerful computers of today.  Computer chips began replacing transistors in the 1960s.  Robert Noyes and Gordon Moore founded Intel in 1968.  With their improved process of designing and mass producing affordable microchips in 1971, the fifth Technological Revolution began in Santa Clara, California — the Age of Information and Telecommunications.  If sufficiently transformational, an invention of the future might kick off the sixth technological revolution.  

Incremental Advances and the hidden history of flight

So too with the airplane in 1903.  The public’s general understanding of the invention of the airplane, as taught in school, consists of the sound bite that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane essentially from scratch, and — bursting out of nowhere — first flew it on the beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903.  This doesn’t begin to do justice to the work done by the long list of aeronautical pioneers during the decades that preceded the Wright Brothers first flight and the role that many other individuals played prior to 1903.  Incremental Advances over a period of several decades created the technological foundation on which the Wright Brothers built their airplane and achieved the first powered flight.  Their invention was the culmination of improvements to innovations that preceded them – knowledge, theories, experiments, and technology gained from engineers, inventors, dreamers, and others in the 1800s.  The role which those other individuals played in the run up to powered flight was significant and is largely unknown today.  When Wilbur and Orville Wright combined their own breakthroughs and meticulous work from 1900 through 1903 with those prior advances, it coalesced into their groundbreaking invention.

In the 1800s we find the first meaningful ideas, aeronautical engineering research, and actual fixed-wing aircraft designs and prototypes which laid the groundwork for the Wright Brothers.  The first major inspiration and visual representation for the invention of the airplane was not the Wright Flyer in 1903.  It was a model patented exactly sixty years earlier in 1843 in England, which might have been capable of flight.  

As described in two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough’s 2015 book, The Wright Brothers, he points out that “many of the most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century had been working on the problem of controlled flight [and] none had succeeded”.  All their work and attempts to invent a flying aircraft were documented and came to the attention of Orville and Wilbur when the brothers met an engineer named Octave Chanute.

Figure 1

Octave Chanute (1832-1910)

Chanute was born in Paris in 1832 and emigrated to the U.S. with his parents when he was six years old.  He grew up in New York City and then went to work in the railroad industry.  He became a successful civil engineer at age 17, which was a remarkable feat since he was self-taught with no formal education in engineering.  After ten years working for the Hudson River Railroad, he became Chief Engineer of the Chicago & Alton Railroad, and remained with that company until 1867, followed by becoming Chief Engineer for the Erie Railroad.  He also designed and built the Chicago Stock Yards, the Union Stockyards in Kansas City, and designed a number of major bridges.

Chanute first became interested in aviation after watching a hot air balloon take off in Peoria, Illinois, in 1856.  But it wasn’t until after he retired from his railroad career in 1883, at age 51, that he began to study aviation in depth, including Otto Lilienthal’s experiments with gliders, and began compiling all the information into a book that he published ten years later.  I came across an early edition of his classic book, Progress in Flying Machines, published in 1894.  This 300-page work is a detailed compilation of all the research and experiments “on the problem of controlled flight” and the people engaged in those efforts during the 1800s who made progress toward inventing a flying machine, particularly from 1842 to the year of publication.  

Referring to the flight of birds, Chanute lamented in the Introduction, “Here is a phenomenon going on daily under our eyes, and it has not been reduced to the sway of mathematical law.”  He revealed the origin of the word that combines “air” and “plane”, by explaining the decades of 19^th century engineers’ and inventors’ efforts to understand the effect of the air as it impacts a thin flat surface — the definition of a “plane” — at different angles.  What are the forces and amount of power required, he asked, and how does that flat surface — the plane — react to those forces?  Birds’ wings are essentially forms of “planes” that evolved over millions of years of natural selection.  Many of the inventors profiled in Progress had studied the movement of birds and their wings and sought to duplicate wings in some way – by their physical details or wing movement or both — with airplane designs that could react to the air pressure resulting from the air hitting those planes or wings at different angles and still maintain control.  The vast majority developed their concepts, experiments, and prototypes starting in the 1840s and continuing into the early 1890s.  

Chanute performed experiments with gliders and developed mathematical formulas on aerodynamics based on those experiments.  Before and after his relationship with the Wright Brothers began in 1899, Chanute published his work in various technical magazines, and gave many speeches and interviews over those years.  The one-page biographical summary of Chanute in the second printing of Progress states that “Chanute and his assistants made literally hundreds of glides from Lake Michigan sand dunes…” beginning in 1896.  This implies that Chanute flew gliders himself.  But the Wrights’ biographer David McCullough wrote that “Chanute…had never physically ventured into the air”.  Other historical sources also confirm that Chanute didn’t actually pilot any gliders himself.  Rather, he based his experiments and formulas on other people’s flights that he observed.

His own aerospace engineering formulas and principles in Progress were not particularly accurate or useful to the Wright Brothers.  Rather, Chanute’s main contribution to aviation history and to the Wright Brothers’ success was Chanute’s detailed description of the 85 aircraft designs in the book, the various inventors’ engineering formulas and principles, and Chanute’s commentary of the would-be inventors’ attempts to build and fly an airplane up to that time.

Elsewhere during this period, the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was formed in January 1866, “for the advancement of Aerial Navigation…”.  The main purpose of the Society was to study and understand heavier-than-air flight.  The U.S. lagged behind Europe.

Chanute’s book also contains hints of the modern helicopter and other creative concepts similar to aircraft that were eventually produced commercially in the 20^th century.  In 1483, Leonardo da Vinci sketched the first known concept of a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — the Aerial Screw, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2

        Leonardo da Vinci’s Aerial Screw

Chanute’s Progress includes another sketch by da Vinci that he made in the year 1500, depicting a set of wings powered by a person’s arms.  

Figure 3

Leonardo da Vinci’s Flapping Wings Aircraft

It’s difficult to make out Figure 3, but this is the first known concept of how humans might achieve winged flight.  The apparatus would be powered by a human lying down, secured to the flat area by the two “half-ring” devices shown.  The “pilot” would then flap the curved wings that extend across the middle of the sketch.  Both of the drawings above were found among da Vinci’s 7,200 pages of notes called “Codices”, consisting of his writings and hundreds of other sketches.  The Codices were miraculously preserved, and they survive to this day.  Chanute described the image in Figure 3 and other da Vinci images from the Codices: 

The first authentic account of a proposal to provide man with flapping wings seems due to Leonardo da Vinci…. He is said not only to have experimented with aerial screws made of paper…but also to have seriously contemplated building an apparatus to propel a pair of wings….[One] sketch shows a wing, actuated by the arms, [and]…the second and third…an apparatus in which the wings are to be waved downward by the legs and lifted up by the arms.

The da Vinci “wings” and Aerial Screw ideas remained on paper and were not turned into experiments or models.  They were included by Chanute only “as a curious forerunner of actual experiments”.  

Octave Chanute and the Wright Brothers

In the Introduction of Progress in Flying Machines, Chanute explained why he wrote the book:

1. To determine whether “with…the light motors recently developed, men might reasonably hope eventually to fly through the air.”  Chanute commented that he “now thinks this question can be answered in the affirmative.”
2. “To save the waste of effort on the part of the experimenters involved in trying again devices which have already failed, and to point out … the causes of such failures….Failures are more instructive than successes; and thus far in flying machines there have been nothing but failures.”
3. “To give an understanding of the principles involved in [recent achievements].”

Anyone trying to design and build a flying machine in the 1800s faced a long list of engineering challenges.  Most were solvable math and physics issues, such as calculating lift by the shape and surface area of the wing and what mechanisms are needed to control the aircraft.  Lift results from a flat surface or “plane” moving through the air, with the curved leading edge of the wings — a convex (upward curve) on the top of the wing, known as “cambered wings” or an “airfoil” (Figure 4).  

  Figure 4

Air flow creating lift on wing

This shape deflects air upward as the wings move forward through the air, resulting in lower pressure above the wing, compared to the higher pressure underneath the wings.  The upward pressure on the wings causes the entire structure (the aeroplane) to be “pulled” upward on the top area of the wing, and “pushed” upward from underneath.  

Chanute addressed lift in his book, beginning with the definition of “aeroplanes”: Aeroplane means “thin fixed surfaces, slightly inclined to the line of motion, and deriving their support from the upward reaction of the air pressure due to the speed, the latter being obtained by some separate propelling device”.  

As a result of the work that preceded them, Orville and Wilbur didn’t have to develop this basic principle of flight themselves since the general concept for designing wings to create lift was already understood in the 1800s and used by people designing gliders well before the Wright Brothers began their work.  Wilbur and Orville Wright did contribute to the understanding of lift by developing detailed formulas on a critical element of lift, known as the “lift-drag ratio”.  In the fall of 1901, they experimented with a small model in a makeshift “wind tunnel” and developed their own calculations and measurements of the lift and drag of a wing’s surface. 

As noted by Chanute, the key issue was how to achieve powered flight – that is, the need for a new power source to pull the aircraft forward to generate airflow across the wings to create lift.  This was the single most important factor for any inventor attempting to achieve sustained flight.  Chanute’s comment on “the light motors recently developed” was a reference to the internal combustion engine invented in the 1870s, and improved during the 1880s.  Chanute and the Wright Brothers also knew about the recent advances in refining crude oil into gasoline, which would be critical to the Wright Brothers’ future.

From 1842 to the 1880s there were bursts of activity by inventors in several countries in Europe who were hoping to be first to achieve powered flight.  All told, Chanute profiled 57 aircraft models and full-sale prototypes (out of the 85 total) which inventors tried to fly between 1812 and 1893.  The concepts ranged from the “ridiculous to the sublime”.  Most were not based on logic or science.  A handful of them were serious well-designed flying machines from an aerodynamics standpoint and had the potential to fly.  Thirty of these inventions were made by French inventors, engineers, and scientists.  

The airplane in Chanute’s book that stands out to me – as the first Incremental Advance that ultimately led to the Wright Brothers success — is William Samuel Henson’s Aerial Steam Carriage, first designed in 1842.  It was the first idea for a modern fixed-wing airplane.  Henson, the British aviation engineer and inventor, formed the Aerial Transit Company in 1843 and also received a patent for his airplane that year.  His patent described the aircraft, including the projected weight of 3,000 pounds.  It was a major breakthrough and turning point in aviation history because it marked the transition from glider experiments to powered flight experimentation.

Figure 5

William Henson Aerial Steam Carriage (1843)

Wrote Chanute, “In 1842, an aeroplane, as we now understand the term, consisting of planes [wings] to sustain the weight, and of a screw [propeller] to propel, was first proposed and experimented with.”  Chanute pointed out that until Henson’s invention, most efforts to build a flying machine took the form of rotating contraptions or attempts to simulate a bird’s flapping wings.  Chanute focused on the need for some type of motor to turn a propeller and pull the aircraft forward to create the airflow across the wings, causing lift.  

William Henson faced the same primary technical problem with his Aerial Steam Carriage in 1843 that all the other inventors of flying machines would face for the following decades.  What was available to Henson as a potential source of power to turn the propeller?  Thomas Newcomen developed the first practical steam engine in 1712.  In 1770, the inventor James Watt dramatically improved the efficiency of Newcomen’s steam engine.  Watt’s engine became widely used to power industrial machinery for powering factories, ships, and trains, for pumping water, boring cannon, and many other industrial applications.  Professor Carlota Perez attributes the first Technological Revolution — the Industrial Revolution – to Watt’s improved steam engine.  It was the triggering event for manufacturers to begin to apply increasingly improved versions of that invention to a broad array of industrial processes and led to the development of other inventions and related technologies.  

Henson turned to the steam engine as the only available source to power the propellers on his airplane — there was no alternative during that period anywhere in the world.  He developed his own smaller and lighter steam engine for use in his Aerial Steam Carriage.  The problem was that “lighter” is a relative term and any type of steam engine with its combination of steel for the boiler, cylinder, pistons, and tubes, plus water, was too heavy to lift itself and Henson’s 3,000-pound aircraft off the ground.  

Henson experimented with unmanned scale models of the Aerial Steam Carriage between 1844 and 1847, using his versions of a steam engine.  But the common sequence of events for the wide variety of failed aircraft inventions throughout the latter half of the 19^th century continued to play out for William Henson.  He made one short powered “hop” with one of his prototypes, but he was otherwise unsuccessful.  Henson’s attempt to use a steam engine to power an airplane was the first in a series of similar applications of the steam engine by other airplane inventors.  Between 1842 and 1960, there were at least 18 aircraft designed, built, and tested which incorporated a steam engine as the source of propulsion.  Most were models.  A few models and a few full-scale steam-powered prototypes briefly left the ground, but none made it to commercial production or even achieved sustained flight.  Seven of those projects occurred prior to the time the internal combustion engine was invented and available for use in aircraft in the late 1800s, and the rest were designed after.  It’s not at all clear why inventors persisted in their attempts to use the steam engine in aircraft after 1890 when internal combustions engines fueled by gasoline were readily available.

During the 60 years following Henson’s introduction of the Aerial Steam Carriage and leading up to the Wright Brothers first flight, there was only a small number of fixed wing flying machines that embodied engineering that might have allowed them to fly.  But even with improved flight controls and accurate aerodynamic design, all would have failed for lack of a practical lightweight motor for forward propulsion.  The idea of powered flight had to wait six decades for the technology of a propulsion source to catch up with that idea. 

Chanute mailed a copy of his book to the Wright Brothers in 1899, and he visited them at Kitty Hawk in the summer of 1901, the second of the brothers’ four annual treks to the beach, and again in 1903.  The Wright Brothers selected Kitty Hawk because of its constant reliable 15-mph wind which enabled the Wright Brothers to perfect the aerodynamics of their glider during the 1900, 1901, and 1902 campaigns – before they added a power source to the aircraft.  Chanute became advisor and mentor to the Wrights.  They exchanged hundreds of letters between 1900 and Chanute’s passing in 1910.  

The second most perplexing issue for the inventors of airplanes in the 1800s was how to control the machine.  “The maintenance of the equilibrium,” as Chanute described it, referring to the need to control pitch, roll, and yaw with manual controls to react immediately to the air currents as they impact the wings and entire structure.  He wrote, “Almost all experiments with aeroplanes have hitherto been flat failures.  This is believed by the writer to result from the difficulty of maintaining the equilibrium of that form of apparatus, both sideways and fore and aft.”

Chanute described Sir George Cayley’s invention of a biplane that had vertical and horizontal “control surfaces” – that is, movable components on the wings to control the aircraft.   In 1857, French aviation pioneer Jean Marie Le Bris built and received a patent for his “aerial car” nicknamed the “winged boat”, equipped with levers and springs intended to enable the pilot to flap the wings.  He successfully flew the invention as a glider until he crashed and broke his leg.  

Le Bris was a French sailor and sea captain, and he was inspired to build a new aircraft by studying the flight of the albatross while sailing around the world.  In 1867, he developed a second glider — the Albatross — which he also flew until he crashed and damaged it beyond repair.  The Albatross had a mechanical flight control system that enabled the pilot to “warp” the wings.  Warping was intended to control the “equilibrium” – that is, the pitch and basic direction of the airplane enabling it to bank right or left.  The Wright Brothers developed a similar wing-warping mechanism for the Wright Flyer.  In 1868, with Le Bris in the pilot seat, his Albatross was the first aircraft ever to be photographed.

Figure 6

Le Bris Albatross

Wilbur and Orville also applied the concept of a “horizontal rudder” shown in some of the designs in Chanute’s book, including the images and descriptions of Thomas Moy’s “aerial steamer”.  This airplane had two sets of tandem wings, one in front of the other (as opposed to a biplane configuration), and a horizontal rudder for equilibrium.  The Wright Flyer’s horizontal rudder was very similar to Moy’s.  Today, control is provided by the moveable pieces you can see — an elevator on the horizontal part of the tail and a stabilizer on the vertical part of the tail, and by flaps and ailerons on the trailing edge of the wings.  

Center of gravity was another important “box” that the Wright Brothers were able to check.  Chanute described the importance of designing flying machines with the center of gravity at the center of lift.  In describing an airplane patented in Great Britain in 1867, Chanute stated, “The motive power was to be placed in a car… capable of being moved forward and back, so as to shift the center of gravity to correspond with the center of pressure at various angles of flight.”

The brothers also followed Chanute’s recommendation to use more than one “plane” or wing for lift – in other words, a biplane like Cayley’s, as well as control surfaces like Cayley’s.  Chanute’s Progress described how multiple flat surfaces could provide lift, and he also reviewed Otto Lilienthal’s advancements in designing gliders in the 1890s which expanded the understanding of lift and the airfoil.  Chanute listed 30 detailed aeronautical engineering principles developed by Lilienthal.  

The Wright Brothers didn’t blindly accept the accuracy of the numerous equations and formulas in Progress in Flying Machines.  They determined that many were totally incorrect and misleading, including much of the math and engineering provided by Chanute, Lilienthal, and many other experimenters.  The Wrights tested and adopted the data that was accurate and supplemented it with their own test data and engineering formulas.  

Chanute was also knowledgeable about what is today referred to as “angle of attack” of the wings: “The important thing for us to know is … what pressure exists under a plane surface when it meets the air at a certain velocity and with a certain angle of incidence.” Their first successful plane, the Wright Flyer, was a biplane design (multiple surfaces), derived from Chanute’s book, as were all their subsequent planes.  

Figure 7

Wright Flyer

The Wright Flyer of 1903 (Figure 7) bears several similarities to Henson’s Aerial Steam Carriage (Figure 5), including: 

• Rectangular wing similar to the Wright Flyer’s biplane wings, 
• Wings and wooden spars covered with fabric, 
• The entire structure braced internally and externally with wires, and 
• Twin counter-rotating propellers on the back side of the wings, as “pusher” props to be powered by an engine.  

All told, Chanute’s research and compilation of attempts to invent the airplane over 60 years, as chronicled in Progress, provided the Wright Brothers with the following critical components and aeronautical principles which they adopted and which formed a foundation of knowledge on which they built the Wright Flyer:

• Lift and the shape of wings
• Multiple wings, and the biplane
• Angle of attack
• “Warping” the wings as the mechanical flight control system
• Horizontal rudder for pitch
• Center of gravity

Chanute’s pre-1894 historical analysis and the facts related to the vast array of aircraft, as well as Chanute’s advice from 1900 to 1903 – that is, the Incremental Advances that were made before the Wright Brothers began their work – were critical to the Wright Brothers’ success.  This doesn’t diminish the importance of the Wright Brothers’ accomplishments – but it does clarify exactly what those accomplishments were and distinguishes their accomplishments from the engineering and other components and principles related to airplanes that were developed by their predecessors.  

With a block of aluminum, the technology finally catches up to the idea

How did the Wright Brothers solve the most critical missing piece of the puzzle: “the motor, its character and its energy, the instrument for obtaining propulsion”, as Chanute identified it in Progress in Flying Machines?  By the time the brothers first read the book in 1899, they realized the importance of this one final component and realized that someone else might crack the code before them.  They needed a motor powerful enough to propel the airplane forward through the air, and light enough to be lifted as part of the airplane.  

Crude oil was first discovered by Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859.  For decades after that discovery, crude oil was refined into kerosene and used almost exclusively for lanterns and other lights.  The chemical process that led to refining oil into gasoline was not developed until later in the century.  The first internal combustion engine was invented and patented in 1872 by the American mechanical engineer and inventor George Brayton.  Gasoline didn’t yet exist, so Brayton’s one-cylinder engine ran on kerosene and oil.  In 1876, Nikolaus Otto patented the compressed charge, four-cycle engine.  A few years later, Karl Benz (German engineer and inventor of the first patented automobile, and namesake of Mercedes Benz) patented a two-stroke gasoline engine.  In 1886, Benz began the first commercial production of motor vehicles with internal combustion engines.  Finally, in 1891, the Russian scientist and engineer, Vladimir Shukhov, developed a commercially viable method to refine crude oil into gasoline.  

Thus, Incremental Advances that took place over a few decades set the stage for a breakthrough in aviation, as well as the auto industry: the internal combustion engine could be fueled by a lightweight liquid that provided more energy per cubic inch than any other fuel source that ever existed.  The first practical internal combustion engine weighed a few hundred pounds, as compared to Henson’s “lightweight” steam engine estimated at between 500 and 1,000 pounds.

The Wright Brothers set out to solve the propulsion challenge in December 1902.  Their calculations indicated that even at a few hundred pounds Benz’s internal combustion engine would be too heavy to get the Wright Flyer off the ground.  They wrote to several manufacturers of automobile engines and asked them if they had an engine no heavier than 200 pounds that could achieve the horsepower and meet the other specifications they gave the engine-makers.  The manufacturers told the Wright Brothers there was no off-the-shelf engine that met Orville’s and Wilbur’s specs.  

Undaunted, they ordered a block of aluminum and had their talented mechanic in the Wright bicycle shop, Charlie Taylor, build an internal combustion engine from scratch.  Taylor had worked for them since 1896.  In The Wright Brothers, David McCullough explains:

The motor had four cylinders with a 4-inch bore hole and a 4-inch stroke.  It was intended to deliver 8 horsepower and weigh not more than 200 pounds, to carry a total of 675 pounds, the estimated combined weight of the flying machine and [a pilot].  As it turned out, the motor Charlie built weighed only 152 pounds, for the reason that the engine block was of cast aluminum provided by the up-and-coming Aluminum Company of America based in Pittsburgh….The work of boring out the aluminum for the independent cylinders and making the cast iron piston rings was all done by one man with a drooping walrus mustache working in the back room at the bicycle shop.

The engine was “amazingly simple and crude”, with no carburetor and no spark plugs.  A one-gallon fuel tank was to be placed on a wing, with the gasoline fed by gravity down a tube to the engine.  

Figure 8

Charlie Taylor at the Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop (circa 1900)

Kill Devil Hill was on a remote island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina that was accessible only by boat.  It was near the fishing village of Kitty Hawk, a poor community with 50 homes.  Here they set up camp, pitched tents and later built large wooden sheds in which to eat, sleep, and to house and work on the glider.  They dug their own water well.  The brothers made the journey to Kitty Hawk for four consecutive years in the summer or fall, starting in 1900, solely to test the “equilibrium” problem — that is, the balance — of their hand-made full-scale glider.  Each year they built a new improved glider, based on what they had learned during the previous year’s outing at Kitty Hawk.

In the back room of the bike shop on West Third Street in Dayton, Wilbur and Orville labored over the airplane during the summer of 1903, making the final adjustments and repairs to the Wright Flyer, preparing it with meticulous detail for the fourth trek and next series of tests in North Carolina.  They began the process of dismantling the Wright Flyer and packing the pieces into crates which were loaded onto a train and shipped to North Carolina and carried by truck and boat to Kitty Hawk.  This trip would be different than the previous ones, however, because they were also shipping Charlie Taylor’s hand-made engine.  They planned on attaching it to the Wright Flyer and turning their glider into an aircraft with its own source of power to leave the ground and keep it aloft.  They were optimistic about this trip to Kill Devil Hill, but had no idea whether it would be their last.  

In the meantime, Samuel Langley, an American aviation pioneer and the third head of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, was also preparing for the first piloted flight of his own airplane, which he called the “Aerodrome”.  Starting in 1896 and continuing into August of 1903, Langley had developed and tested a series of small scale unpiloted glider models that flew successfully.  Langley flew all of his models by launching them from a catapult located on the roof of a large houseboat on the Potomac River, rather than using the wind.  In one of the tests, the model flew about 3,000 feet.  In 1903, he built a full-scale 48-foot wingspan aerodrome that he was preparing for its first piloted and fully powered flight.  He had commissioned the design and fabrication of the first internal combustion engine to a manufacturer in New York, specifically designed for aircraft. At 52 horsepower, it was much more powerful than the Wright Brothers home-made 12-horsepower engine.  

In late September 1903, the Wright Brothers boarded the train and headed east with the aircraft packed in crates.  Arriving at Kitty Hawk in early October, they began to repair their work sheds that had suffered severe damage from storms that battered the coast over the summer.  They reassembled the airplane and flew it as a glider multiple times without the engine. 

Langley was aware of the Wright Brothers arrival at Kitty Hawk and their plans.  On October 7, 1903, the Aerodrome and Langley’s test pilot, Charles Manly, were launched into the air from the houseboat on the Potomac on the first piloted and powered test of the Aerodrome.  The aircraft and Manly promptly plunged into the Potomac.  Over the next few weeks, Langley repaired the airplane and prepared for a second test flight.

On November 2, the Wright Brothers began to ground test the new engine and planned to mount it on a wing for the first time.  Unusually cold weather – including snow in late November — and vibration problems with the engine slowed them down.  On November 5, Octave Chanute joined the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk to provide any advice they might need and to cheer them on.

At the same time that the brothers were in the final stages of testing the engine, Langley was in the final stages of preparing for his second piloted flight of the Aerodrome.  After several weather delays, Langley decided to go ahead with his next attempt.  It was a clear and calm day, Tuesday, December 8, 1903.  The aircraft sat atop the large houseboat in the Potomac, secured to the catapult mechanism.  Around 4:00 in the afternoon, Charles Manly climbed into the Aerodrome and started the engine.  When the catapult was released, the aircraft shot straight up and broke apart.  It crashed into the icy river just a few feet from the boat.  Manly was trapped beneath the surface, but managed to free himself and escape.  

Langley was humiliated by the press and public, but the Wright Brothers were complimentary toward Langley because of his years of supporting efforts toward human flight and for his contributions to humanity in his position as head of the highly respected Smithsonian Institution.  

The brothers were still making repairs to the Flyer until Saturday, December 12, but the wind on that day was too light to try flying.  On Monday the 14th, Orville and Wilbur, with the assistance of some local residents, carried the aircraft from the storage building to Kill Devil Hill. As they were testing the engine and preparing for what they hoped would be their first powered flight, they damaged the Flyer and spent the next two days making repairs.

At Kill Devil Hill on the morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903, it was icy cold, with a 25 mph wind.  Orville lay flat on his stomach at the controls of the Wright Flyer, while waiting for the engine to warm up.  Five local residents, all men, had shown up to watch.  At 10:35 a.m., Orville released the restraining rope and the plane began to slowly slide forward on its skids and then left the ground.  It flew close to the ground for a total distance of just 120 feet, lasting 12 seconds — the first successful powered flight of an aircraft in the history of humankind.  Over the next ninety minutes, each of the brothers flew the Wright Flyer for a total of four progressively longer flights, culminating in Wilbur’s one-minute flight at Noon for a distance of about half a mile.

With the publication of Progress in Flying Machines in 1894, Octave Chanute produced a source of knowledge that might have helped all the innovators, the small number of men scattered throughout Europe and the U.S. trying to invent an airplane.  Over the nine years prior to the Wright Brothers first flight, any of those aspiring inventors could have adopted the lessons learned by their predecessors and the design features described in Progress, built an airworthy fixed-wing airplane, and combined it with a lightweight internal combustion engine.  Langley probably didn’t read Chanute’s book.  His Aerodrome design was fatally flawed, even though he spent $70,000 on it, compared to the Wright Brothers total cost of $1,000 over four years.  The Aerodrome had tandem wings – that is, one behind the other, as compared to the Wright Flyer’s biplane design.  Langley had struggled with the weight of the aircraft and problems with the aerodynamics in his design, including inadequate control surfaces on the wings.  The Wright Brothers’ skills, knowledge, and attention to detail far exceeded Langley’s.  Langley was never able to invent an airplane that could take off utilizing its own propulsion system and remain in the air, and he abandoned his efforts shortly after the Aerodrome’s second crash into the Potomac.  

It was the Wright Brothers – proprietors of a small bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio – nine days after Langley’s last failed attempt, who combined an airworthy glider and a motor to achieve the first sustained and controlled piloted flight of an aircraft in history.

Incremental Advances

Ultimately, Octave Chanute was one of the thousands of little-known but key figures who contributed to the process of Incremental Advances in many fields, laying the path to revolutionary discoveries of natural phenomena and development of groundbreaking inventions.  The Wright Brothers’ invention and their historic flight in 1903 was a culmination of these Incremental Advances over six decades:

1842: William Henson and others begin to design and build fixed-wing airplanes to be powered by an engine 

1859: Edwin Drake drills the world’s first oil well in Pennsylvania and discovers oil

1872, 1876, and 1879: George Brayton, Nicolaus Otto, and Karl Benz individually invent and patent a series of commercial liquid-fueled two-stroke and four-stroke internal combustion engines

1886: Benz begins making cars powered by his engine

1891: The Shukhov cracking process becomes the world’s first commercial method to break down heavier hydrocarbons in crude oil to produce gasoline

1894: Octave Chanute publishes Progress in Flying Machines

1899: The Wright Brothers receive a copy of Chanute’s book

1903: Charlie Taylor builds an internal combustion 12-hp engine that weighs 152 pounds and runs on gasoline

If any one of these events had not occurred when it did, it’s likely that the first successful powered flight would have taken place somewhere other than Kitty Hawk by one or more inventors other than the Wright Brothers, and at a later date in the 1900s. 

The cultural framework needed for fostering innovation

Columbia University economics professor, Edmund Phelps, won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his ground-breaking work in analyzing business innovation and sources of economic growth within a society.  He’s the author of ten books on those subjects.  In his 2013 book, Mass Flourishing, Phelps explains that it’s almost impossible for innovation to occur in societies and economies “where people are not motivated and encouraged to innovate or are not in a position to innovate”.  He describes the “mixture of pecuniary and non-pecuniary motives” that drive innovation – the prospect of significant financial rewards and the attraction of developing a new idea, solving a mystery, meeting a challenge or being a pioneer.  

Most importantly, the overall “system” must create an economic culture that’s favorable to “commercial innovation”.  That includes institutions that enable citizens to reap a financial benefit and a legal system in which people are free to start a new company, raise money, sell shares, and break into an industry.  It includes a system of courts, private ownership of property, the right to accumulate income, laws providing for the formation of partnerships and corporations, and for patents, copyright, and trademarks, availability of banks, loans and credit, democracy and representative government, and other freedoms and sound institutions.

Discrete critical steps – Incremental Advances — led to the revolutionary inventions of the automobile, computer, and the airplane.  As Phelps’ analysis demonstrates, there’s an underlying cultural structure that existed in just four Western capitalist nations – France, Germany, England and the U.S. during the 19^th and 20^th centuries – where the incubating and motivating economic and political environment allowed for those Incremental Advances and inspired the development of the auto, the Wright Brothers airplane, the computer, and thousands of other inventions.  The system enabled innovation itself to flourish in the first place.  

The cultural framework described by Phelps accounts for original and unique ideas being generated and for development of the technology needed to turn ideas into reality.  Phelps researched those systems and conditions which fostered the enormous number of the 19th and 20th century innovations in France, Germany, England, and the U.S.  Supported by extensive data and careful analysis, Phelps makes the case that those four nations are the exceptions and that other nations – including democracies such as Holland, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian and Asian countries – lacked innovation because they consisted of “traditional and conservative economies and values”.  Groundbreaking inventions and discoveries could not have occurred and in fact did not occur outside of those four leading nations or prior to, during, or after those two centuries.  Phelps’ research and conclusions establish the correlation between the Incremental Advances that led to the automobile, airplane, and computer and his conclusion on the necessary cultural framework – that is, all those advances occurred in England, Germany, France, and the U.S.

Years before Phelps’ work was published, my brother and I researched the seven greatest scientific discoveries of natural phenomena in history in our book, The Science Class You Wish You Had, originally published in 1997, followed by a second edition published in 2013.  We identified and delved into the history and the scientists who made those discoveries.  In retrospect, Phelps’ conclusions in Mass Flourishing (published in 2013) firmly validated my own research from the 1990s regarding the four nations that Phelps identified and the 97-year span that straddles two incredible centuries, beginning with the discovery of the cell and genetics in 1856 and ending with the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule by Crick and Watson in 1953.   

The Nations:  Where did the scientists live who made those seven discoveries?  In Science Class, eight of the ten scientists who we profiled who were primarily responsible for the seven greatest scientific discoveries made their discoveries while living in the three of the four Western capitalist nations that Phelps identified — England, Germany, and the U.S.  One of the two individuals living outside of the four nations was Gregor Mendel, the founder of the science of genetics.  He was born in a German-speaking family.  The other person living outside the four nations was the famous Danish physicist, Niels Bohr.

The Period: All but one of the seven greatest discoveries in history – that is, natural phenomena, not inventions — occurred in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  The exception was Newton’s discovery of gravity and the basic laws of physics, documented in his classic book, The Principia, published in 1687.  The 97-year span from 1856 to 1953 was the most remarkable period in the history of science and perhaps the history of the world.  All of the monumental discoveries of natural scientific phenomena were made (or, in Darwin’s case, first published) in that period except Newton’s discovery:

1687 — Gravity and the basic laws of physics: Isaac Newton

1856-82 — The cell and genetics: Walther Fleming and Gregor Mendel

1859 — Evolution and the principle of natural selection: Charles Darwin

1895-1913 — The structure of the atom: Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr

1905 — The principle of relativity: Albert Einstein

1927 — The Big Bang and the formation of the universe: Edwin Hubble

1953 — The structure of the DNA molecule: Francis Crick and James Watson

Though French scientists are not on this list of the seven greatest discoveries of natural phenomena, French scientists such as the chemist Antoine Lavoisier made significant contributions to basic science, and many French inventors played a major role in the development of the airplane, with 30 of the 85 aircraft chronicled by Chanute made by French inventors, engineers, and scientists.  As mentioned, the British inventor William Henson obtained the first patent for an airplane in 1843.  The German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal secured 25 aviation-related patents.  Working with his brother Gustav, Lilienthal designed several hang gliders and made over 2,000 flights in gliders of his design starting in 1891 with his first glider. 

Of the four innovative nations, U.S. inventors contributed the least to the technical development of the airplane during the 1800s.  The Wright Brothers won the “prize”, but as discussed above, they stood on the shoulders of a long list of other pioneers who preceded them and laid the foundation for the future of aviation.

Of course, the sequence of ideas and the resulting development of technology – such as the internal combustion engine — determine when an invention becomes a reality.  Chanute’s Progress narrowed down the issues and elaborated on two primary “missing links” – power and control — thereby helping the Wright Brothers focus on those challenges and become the first to accomplish piloted, powered, and controlled flight.  This was very similar to the progression of underlying technologies required to invent the personal computer (vacuum tubes, followed by transistors, followed by microchips).  The history of the computer and the 19^th century history of ideas and technology that the Wright Brothers relied on before their historic flight are two of the best examples of what Isaac Newton referred to as “standing on the shoulders of giants”.  Alan Turing and the Wright Brothers stood on the shoulders of engineers, scientists and inventors, and would-be aviators of the 1800s.   

Likewise, the concept of a “vertical fast and far” fixed-wing aircraft with ducted fans began in the late 1950s.  It took the next sixty years for the critical technology to evolve and ultimately enable such an aircraft to become a reality.  Working with my colleagues at XTI Aircraft Company on a project less revolutionary than the computer or airplane, we built on the foundation of critical technology and critical components developed over that 60-year period, which made the invention of the TriFan 600 possible.

Unintended consequences

Chanute’s book and his relationship with the Wright Brothers illustrates another aspect of innovation, inventions, and technology, namely, the principle of unintended consequences. Octave Chanute ended his book with this:

The writer is glad to believe that when man succeeds in flying through the air the ultimate effect will be to diminish greatly the frequency of wars… [L]et us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine… will bring nothing but good into the world, that it shall abridge distance, make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relations with each other, advance civilization, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and goodwill among all men.

Chanute’s expression of hope and optimism is, on the one hand, a wonderful foreshadowing of the future use of aircraft – “nothing but good into the world…” — representing the best of humankind and scientific pursuits.  But sadly, on the other hand, it was but a partial foreshadowing and a grossly inaccurate and naïve prediction.  The invention quickly became a critical weapon of war, rather than a tool of peace, as a highly effective platform for firing bullets and delivering missiles and bombs, and later as a deadly weapon itself in the case of the Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II.  

At a meeting of the Institute of International Law in Madrid in 1911, legislation was proposed to limit the use of airplanes to reconnaissance missions and ban them from being used for carrying weapons or dropping bombs.  But that proposal wasn’t adopted and within eleven years after the airplane was invented, it was being used in World War I to attack the enemy when, on October 5, 1914, French pilot Louis Quenalt brought a machine gun on board and opened fire on a German aircraft.  This was the first time an effective weapon was used onboard a plane.  It marked the beginning of the era of air combat as warring nations began to incorporate machine guns into the design of their fighter aircraft.  

Nations also began to develop a separate category of “bomber” aircraft.  The use of strategic bombers began slowly at the beginning of the Great War that later became World War I.  By 1915, the Germans conducted 19 bombing raids, dropping 37 tons of bombs, killing 181 people and injuring 455.  In 1916, Kaiser Wilhelm II authorized raids on urban centers.  The use of airplanes in World War I removed all doubt regarding the effectiveness of airplanes for war.  It was more than a foreshadowing of the succeeding decades and centuries during which the world would witness airplanes dropping millions of tons of bombs on military and civilian targets.  

One of the most obscure and little known stories in the annals of military and industrial history is that of the Diesel engine and its German inventor, Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913).  The Diesel engine – a “compression ignition engine” — was a revolutionary invention.  It doesn’t need spark plugs because its fuel ignites from the heat created by compression of the cylinders.  It can run on oil made from vegetables and nuts, it uses much less fuel than other types of engines, and most importantly, unlike the internal combustion engine, it can be scaled up to provide a massive output of tens of thousands of horsepower.  Much like Chanute’s hope that flying machines would hasten “peace and goodwill among all men”, Diesel originally planned to use his engine to decentralize economies and benefit the poor and working class – for “weaving, woodworking, printing, water pumps, and hospitals”.  Since the engine had the capacity to burn fuel derived from vegetables and nuts, not just burning crude oil and gasoline, Diesel envisioned it boosting agriculture in rural communities.  He made it known that he didn’t want it used for military purposes.   

But also like the Wright Brothers’ invention, once a new technology enters society, its application can’t be controlled by the inventor and is limited only by the imagination of those who use it.  Hope becomes irrelevant and reality sets in.  In the case of Rudolf Diesel’s powerful and highly efficient machine, military applications of the Diesel engine began almost immediately after its power and potential for use in battle ships, submarines, and as railroad engines was proven in the early 1900s, prompted by the threat of imminent war.  Kaiser Wilhelm II supported advances in technology, but primarily for military applications.  Rudolf Diesel feared that this policy would eventually “strangle the sciences”.

As described in Douglas Brunt’s 2023 biography, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel… Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I:

The hoped-for utility of Rudolf’s engine – to bolster rural economies and the artisan class – never came to be.  From the outset of the first patent licensing deals that Rudolf signed in 1897, the fruits of the engine were rapidly co-opted by big industry and the military. 

The Germans launched a total of 344 U-boats [Diesel-powered submarines] during the war, sinking approximately five thousand ships (thirty million gross tons)…. Allied merchant shipping was so disrupted that Great Britain was nearly starved into submission in the months prior to America’s entry into the war in 1917.

Ironically, the airplane, the Diesel engine, and the nuclear bomb have much in common — they have enormous capability for both positive and negative impacts on humanity and have been used for both.  Contrary to the best intentions of Chanute and other innovators who fervently hoped that the airplane would “bring nothing but good into the world”, in August 1945 two airplanes carried nuclear bombs for the first time in the history of humankind.  The Enola Gay bomber delivered “Little Boy” over Hiroshima and Bockscar dropped “Fat Man” over Nagasaki, combining to deal a death blow to Japan and 120,000 of its citizens, finally and dramatically ending World War II.  After the war, the Atomic Energy Commission was formed and promoted the use of nuclear energy to generate electricity for civilian commercial purposes.  There are many nuclear power plants around the world today, but there are also tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in the arsenals of several nations.    

For nearly a century, the “rules of war” continue to be a controversial subject of debate among nations, including the use of military aircraft, spy planes, autonomous weaponized drones, and nuclear weapons.  Similarly, it’s clear that the unknown consequences and the unintended consequences of another advanced technology — artificial intelligence — has become one of the most challenging issues facing the world today.  As with the uses of the airplane and nuclear power, the regulation of AI and the effort to promote its enormous potential for positive impacts, while simultaneously regulating and attempting to eliminate its potential negative impacts, is an issue with which governments and society will be grappling for decades to come.