This was the judgement of Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, in 1895, just eight years before the Wright Brothers actually did it. And he repeated this pronouncement the year before their historic first flight in 1903.
Of course, attempts to fly had been made for centuries. The earliest documented is from Ancient Greece. Leonardo da Vinci famously designed a sort of helicopter in 1493. Over the following centuries dozens of inventors, many of them excellent engineers, had tried and failed.
Was Kelvin an ignorant fool? Quite the reverse. As Bill Bryson notes in his A Short History of Nearly Everything: “He was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten… In the course of a long career he wrote 661 papers, accumulated 69 patents (from which he grew abundantly wealthy) and gained renown in nearly every branch of the physical sciences. Among much else, he suggested the method that led directly to the invention of refrigeration, devised the scale of absolute temperature that still bears his name… His theoretical work, in electromagnetism, thermodynamics and the wave theory of light, was equally revolutionary.”
No. The central problem was that Kelvin assessed the possibilities of powered flight as an expert, and as the revered President of the Royal Society, from the perspective of existing knowledge and experience, all of which appeared to confirm his judgement.
This is exactly the problem facing senior managers when they are confronted with any breakthrough idea. Experience often tells them that it’s been tried before and didn’t work. That it’s not feasible. That it’s quite likely even "absurd". I often think that it’s a kind of miracle when big new ideas get approved for implementation by senior management, especially in large, often risk-averse organisations.
How do you address this issue? And how do you ensure that you’re not being a latter-day Kelvin yourself?
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