Ever made a bold claim only to be immediately proven wrong? Yeah, happens to the best of us. Michael Fish and the hurricane . The “unsinkable” Titanic . Then there was that time one of America’s biggest newspapers predicted it would take one to 10 million years to make a flying machine, 69 days before we managed it. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Cast your mind back to the year 1903. If you weren’t alive yet (good, I won’t send the Zombie Police to your home), it was a time when humans had yet to take to the skies, but that wasn’t for lack of trying.

Our species’ dreams of flying date back to 400 BCE , when kites inspired humans in China that perhaps one day we, too, could soar through the skies. Various iter

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