Miles's blog

There is a skydiver in New Mexico who plans to jump out of a balloon at 120,000 feet, reach a speed of 700 miles an hour, and then deploy a parachute.  He seeks to break the record of 102,000 feet.  When this daredevil, Felix Baumgartner was asked about the sanity of making such an attempt he shrugged his shoulders and replied:   "They said da Vinci was crazy, the Wright Brothers were crazy. It's a phrase for people who don't understand what you're doing."  Stick to skydiving, Felix, and not history.  Nobody said either da Vinci or the Wright Brothers were crazy.

DaVinci, of course was a highly regarded painter.  For most of his life he supported himself through his painting with patrons such as the Medicis.  Inventing was somewhat of a sidelight for him, but a very successful one.  He created a very effective system of protection for the city of Venice, and he was revered for  his engineering.  Baumgartner may have been referring to daVinci’s futuristic designs of things like helicopters and tanks.  While he may have been crazy in designing things which could not possibly have been created with the materials and workmanship of his time, no one called him crazy because he never sought to build these things.  In fact most of what Leonardo discovered about topics like anatomy and engineering remained hidden in his journals.  DaVinci was a fairly secretive man. If you recall he wrote his journals in a mirror image of Italian. 

The Wright Brothers, on the other hand, were never called crazy primarily because they worked in secret.  Like most of those who pursued powered flight at that time, the Wright Brothers began with gliders, a technology which had been around for a long time.  Their advancement to powered flight based on a lot of existing technology.  The Wrights developed most of their testing equipment and plane design alone, but not because they feared public ridicule.  Quite the contrary, even after knowledge of their flight became an international sensation, the Wrights sought secrecy in order to preserve their patent. 

Powered flight was not seen as some sort of stunt or even an impossible achievement.  Others had been claiming achievement of powered flight for some time, and models had proved successful.  So while many did ridicule the idea that something weighing hundreds of pounds might fly, the majority of people knew that development of a practical airplane was just a matter of time.  Nobody said they were crazy, and nobody would have said so.  Unlike Baumgartner, whose goal may perhaps be a laudable advance in science or technology, but one with no foreseeable practical application, the development of the first airplane has been a dream of people since they looked up and saw birds.  By the turn of the 20^th century, the race was on.  The Wrights were not engaged in a stunt, they simply had a leap of insight before anyone else.  Certainly they had a somewhat unorthodox outlook to the development of airplane controls, but nothing outlandish. They were called liars when they could not duplicate their flight at first, but never crazy.

Baumgartner might have been on more solid ground had he said people told Columbus he was crazy.  Columbus had a very poor sense of the size of the Earth, and he thought he could sail east from Europe and hit Asia.  Of course, he was off by thousands of miles and, lucky for him there were some islands and a continent in his way.  Columbus tried to peddle his idea to monarchs all over Europe who kept turning him down.  Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain decided to take a chance, even though, apparently, they thought he was crazy, too.  Baumgartner could take solace from Columbus’s success, although it was more by accident than design, so maybe not.

A lot of people thought John F. Kennedy was crazy for saying we could go to the moon, when at the time he said it America had only been in space for 15 minutes.  Marconi’s request for funding from the Italian government to develop what we now call radio was seen as so fantastic, that the clerk who received wrote “to the Longara” on it.  The Longara was the Roman insane asylum.  James Cameron was often reviled as unrealistic in his expectations for the movies “Titanic” and “Avatar.”  The idea that a meteor caused extinction of the dinosaurs was considered crazy when first proposed, as was the idea that mosquitoes spread disease. 

I have read a little bit about string theory, M theory, and quantum physics, all of which strike me as totally insane, but they are accepted science.  Lots of people said Picasso, Pollack, and Kubrick were crazy.  (Strangely, few said van Gogh was crazy, but then few knew who he was at all.)  Google is inventing a car which will drive itself, an idea people in Detroit think is crazy.  History provide Baumgartner with lots of examples of people who were thought crazy, but weren’t.  Me, I think jumping out a balloon at 120,000 is pretty crazy, but then I used to say I never needed a cell phone, an iPad, or air conditioning in Denver, so what do I know?