One giant leap

For ten thousand years of human history, if man wanted to travel from one place to another, he had to do it on foot or by domesticating animals to carry him or pull him by cart. It was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that man was able to invent the steam-powered locomotive to carry him or his possessions farther and faster. Even though man was able to travel farther and faster, he was always solidly “grounded” to the earth. But man’s mind has always dreamed of breaking the tether of gravity and taking to the heavens like birds. Those dreams were realized and expressed through the genius of writers, bards, and artists like Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). His many designs for flying machines, whether were winged gliders or helicopters, conveyed man’s dream of flying. Man was finally able to break the bounds of earth through the use of lighter-than air balloons or gliders, but it was the first machine-powered flight of Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright’s Flyer on December 17, 1903, that prepared the way for another of man’s dreams: to one day fly to the moon. Those dreams were articulated by great thinkers and artists like Georges Méliès, (1861-1938) whose movie A Trip to the Moon took the viewer on a special effects jaunt to the moon, or H. G. Wells (1866–1946) story, “The First Men In the Moon,” which predestined Neil Armstrong’s (b. 1930) “First Step” some one hundred years. But before man could fly to the moon, he first had to master the air. The world as we once knew it grew smaller after the achievement of one young man just twenty-four years after the first engine-powered aircraft was invented. It took a twenty-five-year-old mail carrier by the name of Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) to win the Orteig Prize and connect the North American continent with the European continent in 1927 through his famous thirty-three-hour solo flight from New York to Paris. Lindbergh had the hubris to believe that he alone could achieve