Today we jump all the way to a Sunday in 1992. The author of an article appearing in The New York Times in 1903, barely two months before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, speculated that a flying machine would be possible in a million to ten million years with “the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians.” That would have been 36 years before the 1939 World’s Fair. I wonder if it was the same writer as the one quoted in the cartoon. Heck, I’ve been watching the same talking heads on television for much of my life; repeatedly being wrong never slows them down—further proof, if any is needed, that people will watch anything after all.
