Word: winging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...English Channel. In 1981 a pilot took the sun-powered Solar Challenger 163 miles from France to a base in England. No wonder the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1980 named MacCready its Engineer of the Century. In the years since, MacCready has fashioned such marvels as the wing-flapping pterodactyl that flew in the IMAX film On the Wing, the General Motors "Impact" electric car and the unmanned solar-powered Pathfinder, which has already flown to 80,000 ft.--higher than any other propeller-driven aircraft...
...brothers in the workroom behind their bike shop, plotting to defy gravity and conquer the wind. Yet that obsessive kind of world-changing belief is a force that drives you to solve a problem, to find the breakthrough--a force that drives you to bet everything on a fragile wing or a new idea. It was a force that led the Wright brothers to invent, single-handedly, each of the technologies they needed to pursue their dream...
When published aeronautical data turned out to be unreliable, the Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and measure empirically how to lift a flying machine into the sky. They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air. They built a forward elevator to control the pitch of their craft as it nosed up and down. They fashioned a pair of twin rudders in back...
...took the methodical application of science by these two American bicycle mechanics to create it. The unmanned gliders spawned by their first efforts flew erratically and were at the mercy of any strong gust of wind. But with help from their wind tunnel, the brothers amassed more data on wing design than anyone before them, compiling tables of computations that are still valid today. And with guidance from this scientific study, they developed the powered 1903 Flyer, a skeletal flying machine of spruce, ash and muslin, with a wingspan of 40 ft. and an unmanned weight of just over...
Heinlein also forecast a 21st century America seized by evil right-wing Christian fundamentalists plugged into cunning propaganda networks. These way-out notions of Heinlein's were composed in the 1940s; he probably thought he was being very provocative, out there and outrageous...