Contrast two beliefs. First Leonardo da Vinci: ‘I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.’ And now the eminent Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb, who in 1902 said: ‘Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.’ The following year Orville Wright took off in Kitty Hawk and flew into the future that da Vinci had imagined.
