I wrote:
Well, not enormous numbers, but there were quite a few. Enough to cause the Wright brothers many problems because, for example, U.S. Army officials assumed they were con artists.
An even bigger problem was incompetent wannabee aviators, especially Langley (Smithsonian) and Ferber (French Army). Langley spent $50,000 of Federal money and crashed into the Potomac twice, in 1903, a few weeks before the Wrights flew. The mass media derided this and ridiculed other attempts to fly. The Army was reluctant to deal with the Wrights years later because of the Langley fiasco.
Langley died in 1906. In 1909 they gave out the first Langley medal, to the Wrights, and later they named an airport after him. Langley was a pioneer and he had some redeeming features, but all in all, I think he was a vindictive jerk who made serious technical errors, held back progress in aviation, and nearly killed his pilot, Manley, twice.
Needless to say, incompetent and dishonest people have caused much harm in over-unity energy research, cold fusion and related fields. It is not fair to hold Prof. A at fault because Prof. B makes a dumb mistake, but people tend to tar them with the same brush. The attitude is that a mistake by cold fusion researcher is a mistake by all. They don't often say this about plasma fusion researchers or doctors. On the other hand, I guess that is what they are saying about climate research, in this so-called Climate-gate scandal.
There is another interesting parallel to cold fusion. Langley's failure, and ones similar to it, were widely taken as proof that man cannot fly and anyone who tries is an impractical ivory tower scientist. There were many popular culture poems and ditties about foolish people trying to fly ("Darius Green and His Flying Machine"), and expressions like "you can no more do that than you can fly!" They did just mean flap your arms; this was a popular culture reference to building an airplane. Bear in mind that people had been doing that since the late 1700s, often killing themselves. Flying was the cliche (or watchword) for an impossible or ridiculous venture. "Most Americans regarded the flying machine as little more than a chimera pursued by foolish dreamers" (T. Crouch, "A Dream of Wings.") Nowadays, of course, people use "cold fusion" to mean the same thing.
The thing is, people back in 1903 took that cliche literately. They did not realize that Pilcher, Lilienthal, Chanute and others had actually glided with considerable success. That was odd because Lilienthal was famous worldwide and there were many photos of him in newspapers. He flew hundreds of times before crashing and killing himself in 1896. I wonder if newspaper readers imagined that he was killed in the first attempt, and never succeeded at all. Technically knowledgeable people understood that flight was difficult, but because of the cliche, some of them overestimated the difficulties, and did not bother to look for a solution. This attitude even infected the Wrights. On the way home from Kitty Hawk after a discouraging season of flight tests in 1901, Orville said "man will not fly for 50 years."
- Jed
