Considering the rate at which technology seems to be advancing these days, it’s almost heterodoxical to suggest that it might have always been so: I just learned that when Orville Wright died in 1948, Chuck Yeager had already broken the sound barrier. So in just 45 years, we’d gone from 12 seconds of wobbly, barely controlled flight just 20 feet off the ground to a jet-powered Bell X-1 hurtling through the air at more than 760 miles an hour.
Zoiks.
