120 years after the Wright Brothers’ revolutionary flight, some lessons in innovation

The significance of great inventions has often been completely overlooked by observers of the time. The historic flight of the Wright brothers on December 17, 1903, exactly 120 years ago, is a case in point.

On a cold winter morning 120 years ago, the Wright brothers took off with the airplane they had been working on for months. It was a highly complex machine to fly. That day, they managed four flights, ranging from 30 to 260 meters, each of which ended rather abruptly. But Pandora’s box had been opened.

There are at least five lessons to be learned from this episode.

It’s difficult to predict the long-term impact of an invention. On December 17, 1903, no one could have imagined what aviation would become. It was a hobby at best. The Wright brothers were surprised when news of flight spread, and they received… an order from French aviation pioneer Louis Ferdinand Ferber.

Great inventions are born that were once thought impossible. The New York Times, for example, just 9 weeks before the historic flight, wrote a scathing article mocking the Wright brothers, estimating that it would take at least… 1 million years to fly an airplane, if it were possible. We are blind to our capacity for progress because we are locked into our mental models.

We don’t necessarily pay attention to what’s significant, and what we do pay attention to is not the most significant. It’s difficult to assess the long-term consequences of events, to distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t in the mountain of everyday facts. We are not necessarily aware that what is presented to us in our favorite news feed is there because it has been selected by someone, i.e. we get the news through a filter. The Wright Brothers’ successful flight made few headlines in the press, even though it was a revolution.

Great inventions have often been the work of marginal individuals. The Wright brothers were bored bicycle makers. They were convinced that it was possible to fly an airplane, which seemed ridiculous to many of their contemporaries, especially the many experts. The idea that anything heavier than air could be made to fly seemed an insurmountable physical limit.

Inventors are ridiculed…until they succeed and become celebrated. Their ambitions and beliefs are ridiculed, as they seem to offend some god with their Promethean attitude. Their approach is ridiculed as the whim of a rich man. We say that their invention, if successful, will be useless (who can imagine using an airplane for anything but fun? We all know there’s no demand for them).

The Wright Brothers’ flight was 120 years ago, but nothing seems to have changed.

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🇫🇷 French version of this article here.