Oddity of the Week: First in Flight
Created | Updated Aug 27, 2012
Wonders never cease. Here's one from 1903. Is this evidence to you?
First in Flight: Evidence?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But is seeing really believing?
The last few weeks, the internet has been a-buzz with the story: Swedish advertising people (allegedly) violated Belarus air space on 4 July, dropping hundreds of subversive teddy bear paratroopers over Minsk and environs. The government there denied that any such thing happened – for about three weeks. Then they did an about-face and fired two generals for letting the side down on national security.
At least one h2g2 Researcher isn't having it, however: she asserts that those advertising people are infamous for hoaxing the public. They may have only pretended to have dropped the teddy bears. Photos and video may be a clever ruse. And, indeed, this is possible: in this age of CGI and photoshop, we really have to doubt what we see a lot of the time. Where do we draw the line in skepticism?
It isn't as if people in 1903 didn't know about hoaxes. They'd seen a few in their time. After all, so-called 'spirit photographs' of ghosts had been around since 1860 – and at least some, if not most, knew what the words 'double exposure' meant by now. Harry Houdini, the magician, spent a lot of time debunking spiritualists, while fooling people with his own brand of 'magic' and not even using his own name. A certain amount of flim-flam was only to be expected.
But what about the photo above? Apparently, the Wright Brothers didn't have any trouble getting people to believe them, although human flight had been the dream of the ages. The brothers from Dayton finally cracked the problem of powered, controlled flight on 17 December, 1903, on a North Carolina beach. Their problem wasn't credibility, but publicity: amazingly to us, the newspapers weren't really interested, and nobody kicked up much of a fuss. There was a certain amount of 'so what?' about the whole business.
There's the picture, if you don't believe us: John T Daniels snapped the historic moment. That's Wilbur running – Orville's the pilot. He only flew 120 feet, but, wow – talk about 'one small step for a man. . . '
How do we know they did it? In addition to the photo, you can view the plane in the Smithsonian. And it was a repeatable experiment – although experts say only the Wrights could have flown that contraption. It was, er, temperamental.
Finally, we tend to believe in the Wright Brothers because, from that day, flight. . .well, took off (you will pardon the expression). In fact, people yawn pretty much about things that soar these days. Stop and reflect: how excited did you get this month when you heard that NASA engineers were manipulating a vehicle the size of an SUV by remote control. . . and it's on Mars, 225 million miles away? We're sort of jaded, even when Curiosity Rover sends us pics like this one:
I'm sure somebody will criticise the composition, etc, but NASA and Curiosity don't care. They're tweeting at us: 'No photo or it didn't happen? Lookee here.' Translation: stop saying we didn't go to the Moon. Did, too. And we're on Mars now, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Of course, it could be photoshop. But we believe them.
