Where Are The Edges Of Today's Technology World?

Veeru writes "As mentioned on Nova, my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight almost 100 years ago. Scientific American had rejected his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'. The secretive Wright Brothers allowed Amos to publish the article in his own Gleanings Bee magazine instead. Because of his objective account, other experimenters may not have received the credit they deserved. I recently realized that Amos was intent on investigating the highest tech advances of the day and that the airplane was the most advanced phenomenon he could find. If Amos were alive today, what obscure technology would he be pursuing?"

Comments

Re:Time travel

[WinterpegCanuck]

A quick google answered my own memory gap. Here is a short article on it. Yeah, bad karma for posting without researching better the first time, but I have an exam tomorrow. Back to the books. Cheers.

Re:Time travel

[VertigoAce]

While I haven't heard about the theory the original poster was talking about, I understood it as allowing travel back to the time when the machine was turned on.

In general I agree that time travel backward through time is impossible using the same logic you used. Maybe (though I doubt it) it is possible to use a machine to travel back to when the machine was started. As such a machine does not currently exist, we couldn't use everyday experience to rule it out.

Rename it?

[herrvinny]

What about renaming them? MRI (Magnetic Reasonance Imaging) came from NRI (Nuclear RI), renamed because doctors thought patients might not like the word nuclear.

Your gramp was late, Ader was first

[SysKoll]

Maybe your gramp should have traveled to Europe. There, he would have found that the first powered flight occured in France on October the 12th, 1897. Clement Ader flew his steam-powered (!) Avion on about 150 ft in front of his military patrons.

The French army brass, disappointed that they couldn't already have a B-52, cancelled the funding, and a bitter Clement Ader stopped his aeronautical experiments.

The real innovation introduced by the Wright brothers was an effective way of controlling the plane. The Avion was using a crude wing-warping system that didn't prove efficient. However, the Wright machine was just as unbalanced as Ader's Avion.

The steam engine was the only available motor at the time of Ader's design, and its shortcoming prevented the Avion from flying for more than a few minutes because of the water and fuel weight.

However, flight historians should say that the Wright brothers made the first powered, guided flight, wereas Ader made the first powered flight.