"If birds can glide for long periods of time, then... why can't I?" - Orville Wright
Louis Blériot was the first person to make a working, powered, piloted monoplane.
"The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." - Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, August 3rd 1914.
“Gas Bag Buses” were improvised from Chinese designs to ease the shortage of petrol being used to power military vehicles during World War I.
"The old world was doomed. The old society, the old economy, the old systems had, as the Chinese phrase put it, "lost the mandate of Heaven." - Eric J. Hobsbawm.
Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis cleared the telephone lines at the end of Roosevelt Field, Long Island by a mere six metres when taking off.
"Success by mere experiment would been as unlikely as the successful construction of a cantilever bridge without any previous engineering experience." - Juan de la Cierva, inventor of the Autogyro.
The rotor configuration designed by Igor Sikorsky, inventor of the helicopter, is still used in the majority of modern helicopters today.
"Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history." - Henry Stimson, April 25th 1945.
The first electronic calculating machine weighed 27 tonnes, took up 1800 square feet, and consumed a massive 150kW of power!
“The pursuit of light and space will lead man to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.” - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
The best selling record of the entire decade was “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets.
"I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." - Neil A. Armstrong, looking at the Earth from the Moon, July 1969.
The name for Concorde is derived from both the French “concorde” and theEnglish “concord,” both of which mean agreement, harmony or union.
“I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.” – Louise Brown, the first “Test Tube Baby".
Sony opted to choose “Walkman” as the name partly because of the popularity of Superman in 1979.
“You cannot predict the future.” - Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Launched for the first time on 12 April 1981, Columbia was the first of NASA's fleet of reusable Space Shuttles
“We now know that a cell can fire up dormant genetic instructions, and can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology.” – Charles Krauthammer, TIME Magazine, March 10th 1997.
IBM Simon was the world’s first smartphone. Introduced in 1993, it was a phone, pager, fax machine and PDA rolled into one – with a touchscreen and full keyboard.
"There's no other product that changes function like the computer." - Jonathan Ive
The Human Genome Project - a map of all the genes in the human genome - was declared complete in April 2003
“By personal fabrication, what I mean is ordinary people creating, rather than consuming technology, creating technology to solve local problems.” – Neil Gershenfeld, MIT Professor on digital fabrication.
Apple sold over 15 million first generation iPads during 2010 – selling the first million within the first two months of release.
