As a measure of humanity’s progress with things technological, it’s hard to come up with a more dramatic example than aerospace, which in the course of just 66 years went from the Wrights coaxing their rackety flyer into the gusty North Carolina oceanside air to Neil and Buzz going for a stroll on the moon. There were people alive in 1969 who remembered very well the first planes flying. That all of that progress came within an average human’s lifespan is unfathomable in terms of human history. After all, it took us millennia to figure out agriculture, but by the time the internal combustion engine showed up on the scene, things started happening fast.
Evolutionary biologist and lifelong New York Yankees fan Stephen J. Gould came up with the idea of punctuated equilibrium, that is, that evolutionary changes in organisms don’t happen in a steady, predictable way but, rather, in peaks and valleys. As change becomes more rapid, the process becomes an incubator for even more change, like a wildfire creating its own weather.
And that’s what happened with flying, too. As new technologies were developed, those technologies helped spawn others. In just a small example, the advent of instrument flying, for instance, helped give rise to the development of advanced instrumentation, a variety of sensors, ground navigation systems, onboard radar, in-cockpit weather and more.
But as great as the jumpstart that invention gives to further invention is, nothing drives technological progress as much as world events. And aviation has been changed fundamentally over the past hundred-plus years by events whose impact on culture were both unforeseeable and terribly, obviously waiting to happen.
