If inventiveness is the greatest of all of humanity’s talents, then hubris is the greatest of its flaws. We believe with every fiber of our beings that we are the masters of our world; that if we will it, we can achieve it. This has led us to incredible heights, but also to spectacular crashes.
This is the Forgotten History of the Arrogant Prediction.
The New York Times was easily the world’s most important and influential media outlet. Founded in 1851 and emerging as a major player in news with its exposes on the corruption of Tammany Hall 20 years later, it was now, at the dawn of a new century, an international source for information.
The Times’ powerful and forward-thinking editor, Charles Ochs, steered the paper from the brink of ruin during the Panic of 1893 with a new slogan that also served as its mission statement: “All the news that’s fit to print.”
Hundreds of reporters and photographers covered the world, while a team of editors expertly crafted the news that the Times would deem fit to print. It became a must-read every day, and its circulation exploded.
Its reporting was consistently top-notch, and its editorials set the agenda for the city, state, and even the nation. Read by presidents and kings alike, the Times was on top of the world, and its editors knew it.
The paper’s meteoric rise coincided with America’s—the industrial revolution brought it unprecedented wealth and its citizens suddenly had time to pursue their passions. This led to an unparalleled rise in innovation—from the electric light bulb to the telephone—but still humanity aimed higher.
It wanted to fly. Across the country, inventors raced to achieve what seemed to be impossible: heavier than air flight. Could a machine powered by man reach the heavens? Many tried, and all failed; so many, in fact, that the pursuit itself was thought to be borne of arrogance. Were these young upstarts really trying to play God in a fruitless attempt to touch the sky?
Most of those in power thought they were, and were confident that they would never succeed. George W. Melville, the Engineer in Chief of the United States Navy, called it a “childish fantasy” and wrote that “there probably can be found no better example of the speculative tendency carrying man to the verge of the chimerical than in his attempts to imitate the birds, or no field where so much inventive seed has been sown with so little return as in the attempts of man to fly successfully through the air.”
Still, inventors persisted, undeterred by each crash. Flight wasn’t impossible; it was just impossible right now. The race to the skies intensified so publicly in 1903 that even the New York Times editors felt the need to weigh in. They were, after all, the most trusted, most important voices in media, and surely their words would be the final ones on this childish fantasy.
On October 9th, 1903, the editors published an editorial entitled “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,” aimed at dissuading any further interest in the subject:
The editors compared man’s flight with that of birds, which the new theories of Charles Darwin suggested developed over thousands of years.
“Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one with started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years — provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials.”
This was the last word on the hubris that prompted man’s pursuit of flight, but it turned out that the real hubris belonged to the editors of the New York Times in their gross underestimation of human ingenuity. On December 17th, 1903—not a million or ten million years after the publication of the editorial, but a mere nine weeks, Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the impossible with the very first flight.