Five hundred years, all for one breakthrough.

Q1: How long did it take to invent an aeroplane?
SYC: The way I look at it, it took us 500 years.

All inventions begin with an idea. In the case of airplanes, the first person to conceive the idea, by my account, was Leonardo Da Vinci. He must have been quite familiar with physical motions, as you can see from the image above that his design did bear some resemblance to the modern-day helicopter.

We should realize that Leonardo (1452-1519) did his work before Isaac Newton (1642-1726) conceptualized gravity. Although Leonardo didn't succeed, he did sow the seeds. I don't think Isaac Newton tried seriously to invent any flying machine, but his contributions (calculus, Newton's laws, gravity) served as the fundamentals in physics.

One of the many reasons that these two legendary scientists couldn't and didn't successfully invent the airplane is because they were ahead of their time, and they didn't have access to an important ingredient: fuel. "The modern history of petroleum began in 1846 with the discovery of the process of refining kerosene from coal by Nova Scotian Abraham Pineo Gesner" according to Wikipedia (keyword petroleum).

Aviation had a breakthroughs and entered a new era when the Wright brothers of North Carolina, USA, invented the first airplane in 1903.

I write this post to highlight a point: it took more than 500 years and more than one type of expertise to invent the airplane. Da Vinci and Newton were good physicts, but they weren't petroleum engineers. No one expected them to do petroleum refinement, just like we don't expect our modern-day physicts to do petroleum refinement. Besides fuel and physics, advancement in other areas of science were needed. For example, material science was needed for the invention of new lightweight material used in the construction of the airplane.

We humans once had a profound goal: to invent an airplane. We stretched our research abilities to achieve this goal. The generations of scientists prior to the Wright brothers must have had to endure many dissapointments and failures, but at the same time, they had to convince their sponsors to continue to fund them despite their lack of breakthroughs. The funding agencies must have been equally frustrated because they kept sponsoring projects that never seemingly paid off.

In 2008, we are faced with ongoing or new scientific goals: to cure cancer, to further explore outerspace, to stop global warming, etc. While it is easy to define goals, it usually takes a long time to accomplish the goals. Scientists try hard, and I sometimes wonder if the present generation of scientists are ahead of their time (or whether we should be) in trying to solve the aforementioned challenges. If so, then like Leonardo, we will "seemingly" not accomplish any breakthroughs, but the future generations will look back and thank us for sowing the seeds. At the meantime, the present generation will keep having difficulties convincing funding agencies to fund us.

It took us 500 years to invent an airplane. If a group of scientists was to ask Congress for, say, one million, one billion, or one trillion dollars to fund an important project of which they can't promise a completion timeline, should congress support that goal? Would you if you're a member of the Congress?