Once again, the distillation of the argument turns on "my stack of credentials" versus "that stack of credentials".
What were the Wright Brothers "credentials" when it came to flying,(??) compared to Professor Samuel Pierpoint Langley, secretary at the Smithsonian Institute:
"Secretary Langley was ideally situated to advance the cause of flight. His stature as a scientist, based on his astronomical discoveries, lent prestige to aeronautical experimentation, although even he felt constrained to camouflage his early work as research in "pneumatics" for fear of invoking the ridicule that the media showered on all who were so foolish as to suggest man might fly. Moreover, at the Smithsonian he had access to the funding so essential to carry out the long course of experiments needed to isolate the fundamentals of flight. As a scientist, Langley recognized that in the long run the identification of sound principles would be more helpful than a trial-and-error, cut-and-fit approach to powered flight. Unfortunately, his actual capacity as a scientist fell far short of his vision of the tasks to be done; for example, his formulation of "Langley’s Law" on the relation of the power required to sustain speed in flight was abruptly discredited by Lord Kelvin with a brief but elegant mathematical calculation."
"..the flawed and tragic figure of S. P. Langley, who apparently never sullied his hands with the actual work of construction. Instead, he would appear in his Smithsonian laboratory formally attired in stiff collar, morning coat, and striped pants while imperiously issuing orders to subordinates whose creativity he stifled and even resented when they turned up with manifestly valuable ideas. His approach was to experiment with scale models, curiously misnamed "aerodromes," which he expected to enlarge to full size when he had acquired sufficient knowledge to justify such a step. Trials on the Potomac River in 1896 of Langley’s tandem-wing monoplane models seemed to suggest that successful man flight was within grasp. With the distinguished aeronautical scientist and inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, serving as official observer and timekeeper, the quarter-scale model traveled more than 3300 feet before coming to rest.
By circulating Bell’s highly laudatory account of the successful flights with powered models, Langley knew he could use the inventor’s scientific stature to win financial support for a full-scale, man-carrying airplane. This he proceeded to do. Five days after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he secured a government subsidy of $50,000 on the basis of the military potential of an airplane. Something of Langley’s arrogance is implicit in his insistence that he be allowed to retain all rights to the final design even though the War Department was footing the bill and he himself was a public servant. Although he apparently believed that success was just over the horizon, he was actually far from the goal."
"Scaling up from his flying model to a man-carrying airplane proved to be far more difficult than Langley had anticipated. While concentrating his energies on achieving sufficient lift and developing an efficient gasoline engine, he largely ignored the all-important problem of control. Furthermore, in his zeal to reduce weight, he trimmed the load-bearing members of his aerodrome until it was structurally unsound. The resulting disaster was virtually inevitable. When Langley finally tested his machine in October 1903, it crashed ignominiously, falling, as one observer put, "like a handful of mortar" from its launching platform. The wave of congressional scorn and media ridicule that followed was to reverberate for years, an active deterrent to any military official with the least inclination to support the development of a promising but yet unproved invention."
Learn from history about "credentials".
After all, those 19th century experts calculating the beginning of the world at a date of 4004 BC had =all= the documents and evidence from antiquity at their disposal...maybe more than us today!
" James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin was highly regarded in his day as a churchman and as a scholar. Of his many works, his treatise on chronology has proved the most durable. Based on an intricate correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories and Holy writ, it was incorporated into an authorized version of the Bible printed in 1701, and thus came to be regarded with almost as much unquestioning reverence as the Bible itself. Having established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, by the arguments set forth in the passage below, Ussher calculated the dates of other biblical events, concluding, for example, that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 BC, and that the ark touched down on Mt Ararat on 5 May 1491 BC `on a Wednesday'." |
