Evolution Of Technology

What if on December 17, 1903, a truck drove out onto the beach in North Carolina called Kittyhawk pulling a trailer with an F-14 Tomcat? Two brothers who designed and built the first flying machine set up a steam catapult system to test whether it would work.

If only the evolution of technology would work that way. Instead of building the first flying machine out of spruce wood, casting an engine block out of aluminum, and installing a gravity-fed fuel system with no fuel pump, they built a sophisticated swing-wing air machine out of composite materials with two jet engines. Just to be safe, they added ejection seats. The timeline of evolving technology doesn’t work that way, right? We must learn at the most basic level rather than go straight to Super Sonic.

Looking back and considering what we know now, we can see the step-by-step progression of how flight has evolved. There were a lot of mistakes along the way, as well as a lot of risks, but people were willing to take the risks, sometimes at the ultimate cost. That is how we as humans learn: we build from the most basic level. That is the key: keep building and improving. Had we put a stop to the progress of the technology when the first test pilot was killed instead of learning what happened and how to prevent that from happening again, we may not have the aviation technology that exists today.

When I started writing this, I did not have a point to make, only to show the ‘what if’ in the evolution of technology. What if we could start at the top, or at least the midway point, instead of creating something out of nothing? What if the first airplane was a DC-3 instead of a fragile spruce wood aircraft that flew only a few feet?