People have always delighted in the petty failures of new methods of transportation, more than other kinds of inventions. The Greek legend of Icarus may be the oldest recorded example. [Recall, his father built him wings made of feathers bonded with beeswax to escape from prison. He flew too high and the sun melted the beeswax, plunging him to his death in the ocean.] I have to say that the legend of Icarus has always grated on me since I first heard it as a boy. I probably asked my dad hundreds of questions like, “Wouldn’t epoxy glue work better than beeswax? Why didn’t they try that? Or maybe he could just spritz water on the wings to keep them cool? Can we go buy some feathers?”
In the reality of the legend, the hero invented something revolutionary and tremendously important. He made a mistake in the details, and it caused a crash. The audience is meant to laugh and smugly reassure themselves that man was not meant to fly after all. By not learning from the experiment and fixing the small flaw, they set human-powered flight back more than 2000 years.
Something to think about when next we read or hear about someone reaching for the stars . . . .
And the stuff about buildind a Segway workalike is interesting too . . . .