More Tournament Madness
Ever since economists startled me by dissing tournaments, I have been fascinated by their ubiquity and utility as well as their potential for waste. Of course the whole panoply of life is a tournament of sorts, but let's consider one that was important in the development of the modern world: the invention of aircraft. We have wanted to join the birds in the air at least since ancient times, but no real progress was made on making machines fly until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Not at all coincidentally that was the same time at which another great tournament was picking up speed - the industrial revolution. In the late 1790s, Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet, Member of Parliment, and prolific inventor turned his attention to flight. His experiments were models of ingenuity, and he discovered many key principles of lift and flight. He designed and built the first successful manned glider and created the basic aircraft design that is used today. It took more than another c...