When Wilbur and Orville Wright managed to build and fly an airplane, you might imagine that the world was immediately dazzled by their amazing achievement.
You’d be wrong.
As David McCullough chronicles in his excellent book The Wright Brothers, many of the “most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century had been working on the problem of controlled flight,” without success. The endeavor was fraught with hazards that included “humiliating failure, injury, and, of course, death, (but also)… the inevitable prospect of being mocked as a crank, a crackpot, and in many cases with good reason.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucekasanoff/2016/01/30/six-lessons-on-innovation-from-the-wright-brothers/#16b227ae31dd
