I saw a NOVA segment on the Wright brothers' invention of a powered flight machine which rang a few bells.

The first was the fact that a couple of bicycle shop proprietors obsessed with flight since they were boys succeeded though a lavishly funded group headed by Samuel Langley, the third Secretary of the Smithsonian , failed spectacularly and publicly. A key reason was that the Wright brothers understood flight as an analogy to riding a bicycle, an inherently unstable device in need of piloting, while Langley understood flight as an analogy to ship sailing, an inherently stable device which can function after a fashion with no pilot at all.

Just as importantly the Wright brothers had neither the time nor the money to take a brute force approach. Rather than building a series of models with different wing designs and testing them for lift they used a wind tunnel to test small components held in a wind stream by ingenious measurement devices of their own invention. To this day their measurements are nearly as accurate as those of modern designers and their wing and propeller designs are superb. Their lack of resources resulted in superior designs.

Today Chris Genovese of Signal + Noise posted about a project he and his young son are engaged in to build paper airplanes. Their task is easier than the one the Wright brothers faced since they were able to google up a wealth of information in a single sitting. There is much more information now and it is much more easily available. I imagine a multitude of children with little more than a net connection and a sympathetic adult assistant diligently inventing our future for the pleasure of it. I suspect these agile and hungry young minds have already hatched notions that will soon come to fruition.