echnical innovation can clearly only succeed once appropriate financial, social and technological factors are in place. To take an extreme case, in about 1500AD Leonardo da Vinci sketched the rather obvious concept of a rotating blade generating lift, but the helicopter remained literally a flight of fancy for 400 years until a power unit with a suitable power-to-weight ratio was developed. By then, fixed-wing aircraft were in the ascendency (again, literally), and
Pipe dreams don’t pay the bills
Feb 01, 2023
2 minutes
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