• tal@lemmy.today
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    8 months ago

    No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

    googles

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

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

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

    • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      “Brought in its train” what an interesting phrase, do people still say this? Is it the same as “in its wake” we use today?

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      8 months ago

      Oh, and to provide numbers:

      https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris

      That’s 5,837.07 km.

      As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer

      In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).

      That’s 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.

      As for time:

      No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping…

      The longest flight by time:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager

      The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base’s 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.

      • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it’s not really what he was thinking about as it’s launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.