Today is Orville Wright's birthday - he was born in 1871. He was the longest surviving brother of the famous Wright Brothers. Their first flight was 120 feet and had five witnesses besides the Wright Brothers. The second flight that day was 852 feet and 59 seconds.
Even though people came out to watch their experiments regularly, the record flight was disbelieved. The American press reported it as a hoax with headlines something like like 'Liar not Flyer'. They had to go to Europe to get financial backing - they were not taken seriously in the U.S. The story of how the press distorted the first flight is outlined HERE.
The most devastating aspect of their invention was they created flight to bring lasting peace to the Earth. They thought that the ability of planes to do surveillance meant that ground combat would become irrelevant. Instead, the military immediately had pilots throw grenades from the planes and shoot other pilots with rifles or revolvers.
Wright says: “We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the Earth. But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and to corrupt good means for an evil end,” Orville said in an article with the St. Louis Post Dispatch on November 7, 1943. “No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I the destruction it has caused.”
He wasn't the only inventor to find things not go well for his invention. Philo Farnsworth invented the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), and the first all-electronic television system. He felt that television was a gift of God, and would bring education and prosperity to the world. But he discovered otherwise, and refused to have a television in his house. He said: "There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet."
There seem to be many inventors who regretted their inventions - here are historical figures: Anna Jarvis, creator of Mother's Day Albert Einstein, whose theories helped create the atomic bomb Mikhail Kalashnikov, creator of the AK-47
Recent regretters: Victor Connare, who invented the top face Comic Sans (used here) Ethan Zuckerman, creator of the pop-up ad Wally Conron, creator of the Labradoodle John Sylvan, creator of the K-Cup Scott Fhalman, creator of the emoticon
And finally poor Bob Propst - the inventor of the office 'cubicle' that has been perpetrated on most of us. It started out as a fluid, organic office environment meant to generate creativity, and turned into rat-maze boxes of offices. "The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity" he said.
Here's a more cheerful garden moment from the Buffalo garden Walk.
