Anyone who has been gifted with the peculiar responsibilities that come with being a parent has experienced the exasperation of being peppered with “why” by a young child.
“Why is the sky blue?” they ask. To which the doting parent explains the concept of light wavelengths as best they can, in terms acceptable to a child. To which the child will ask “but why?”
This can go on for a while. And that’s good. The child is learning to think, to question their surroundings, to seek new information. Over time the child learns many new things. Some of which are true. Some are not.
Never stop asking why.
One teacher sticks out in my mind on this topic. She was young, probably no more than 25 or so. Maybe even younger. A substitute teacher in the school system I was assigned to as a child, one of my classmates asked her why the sky was blue. She explained that light from the sun reflected off the water in the ocean, which is blue. That reflection made it look as if our sky is blue as well.
That answer is creative, for sure. It’s not particularly accurate though.
Everybody makes mistakes. There’s no shame in that. The quest for humans is to continue to expand our body of knowledge. To weed out the incorrect information and replace it with more authentic insights.
That’s the history of aviation as well.
For many thousands of years human beings imagined what it might be like to fly. What would the world look like from up high? Sure, we could climb a mountain and look down on the lowlands. But there are places where there is no mountain to climb. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see that landscape from 1,000 feet in the air?
To the naysayers who said it would be impossible, the dreamers asked why?
Those putting the kibosh on the idea of manned flight were often respected men in positions of authority. They had grown into adulthood and become comfortable with the status quo. They no longer asked hard questions. They simply worked the levers of industry as their fathers had done before them. What’s the point of innovation when things are going so well?
Yet the weird ones, the outsiders, the less than conventional minority continued to ask the questions. They persisted in their belief they could achieve the impossible. They could massage technology to make great things happen. They persevered. Even in the face of financial ruin, personal risk, and possible death they kept up the struggle.
For example…
His brothers having successfully powered, and flown, and controlled a heavier than air machine for the first time in history, Lorin Wright toddled down to the newspaper office of The Dayton Journal to give them the scoop. Lorin met with an AP representative named Frank Tunison who declined the story as being less than newsworthy.
This puts Frank in a select club of socially and technologically myopic individuals along with Dick Rowe. In 1962 Dick famously turned down The Beatles for a recording contract with the plainly stated belief, “guitar groups are on the way out.”
Without curiosity, with no consideration of the bigger picture, we are a mere shadow of our true potential.
The New York Times famously mocked Robert Goddard for having the temerity to suggest rockets could lift humans into space, even to reach the moon. The highly educated, astutely opinionated men of the media were adamant that a rocket could not work in space, since it would have nothing to push off from or react to in the vacuum.
“Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” said the Times.
On July 17, 1969, the New York Times issued an apology to Dr. Goddard, who had been dead for 15 years. Apparently Goddard knew a thing or two about physics after all.
Arrogance is the antithesis of curiosity. When we stop asking why, we stop making progress.
When early airplanes would occasionally roll into a spin that carried the hapless pilot all the way to the ground, the question once again was raised: Why?
This simple question caused numerous pilots, engineers, and aircraft manufacturers to put on their thinking caps. What caused the spin? How could a designer build an aircraft in a way that might prevent, or at least minimize, the risk? How might a pilot correct for the spin and bring the airplane back to level flight?
Out of all those questions being asked by all those interested parties, solutions were found. Aviation became safer. Aircraft were designed and built with greater insight into the environment they’d perform in. Unimaginable growth of the industry was the result.
There are as many nut jobs proposing idiotic ideas to the rest of the population as there ever were. They include a return to the moon by men and women to set up a permanent base of operations there. Rockets to Mars with the intent of moving enough humans over time to populate that planet as a second home. Supersonic passenger flights that won’t annoy the neighbors with nerve-jangling sonic booms.
The thing is the folks proposing these ideas aren’t nuts. They aren’t wrong. They’re just ahead of their time. Their thoughts have outpaced the technology of the day. But as has happened in the past, the technology catches up exactly because these crazy ideas proliferate through the years.
Never lose the childlike innocence that allows us to ask why so often when we were young. Cherish it as a gift. Too many of us push it out of our minds in an attempt to cast off childish things in favor of adulthood. It’s the dreamers who do big things. That has always been the case.
Why can’t I have a radio in the airplane? Why can’t we mount a parachute to the airplane itself? Why can’t I have a device in my panel that shows my course and all the information I need to know along the way — like a little television connected to a computer.
Why, indeed.
