Things That Were Impossible That Happened Yes, there actually are things which the experts said would be impossible and yet they happened. One of those things is a runner, running a mile in 4 minutes or less. The feat was accomplished by Roger Bannister in 1954 and he needed oxygen after running. He ran it in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. Today the record for the 3mile stands at 3 minutes, 43.13 seconds. Pretty good for something which was supposed to be impossible. When computers were first invented, they filled large rooms and the experts said there would never be a market for more than 3 or 4 of them. It would be impossible to sell more. Obviously, they were wrong. First of all, no one ever thought they would become so small as to fit into a shirt pocket and have a telephone, camera, game machine and word processor built into them. There is a prediction we will reach 50 billion mobile devices by 2030 and this is not counting desk top computers. Today we have 5.11 billion mobile devices. So many experts said we would never be able to make someone invisible. It was just the stuff of comics. As shocking as this sounds, we now have invisibility in the form of a material that can be wrapped around something including people and bends the light around it, thus hiding what is in the center. It seems if you work at a problem long enough, you might be able to solve it and that is just what happened. Man will never fly. This was overturned in 1783 by Joseph-Michael and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier who made the first hot air balloon flight that year. In 1852 a steam powered airship built and piloted by Henri Giffard flew 17 miles. The Wright Brothers went on to make the first powered airplane flight in 1903. As planes got faster many scientists were claiming we would never be able to break the sound barrier. Some said the plane could not support that speed without breaking apart. In 1947 Chuck Yeager was flying a plane named Glamorous Glennis after his wife and flew it past the sound barrier at a speed of 660 miles per hour. The plane was rocket powered. At one time it was thought the maximum speed a person could travel at was 30 miles per hour because anything faster would suffocate a human. Today we can analyze stars using a spectrograph attached to a telescope. It wasn’t very long ago when we were told it would be impossible to find out about a star’s makeup. Indeed, it was impossible for most of history, but as with many other things technology marches on and new tools get invented. It was thought nuclear energy was beyond the capability of human science and nuclear power would never be obtained. Even Einstein said “There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” Boy was he wrong on that one. Nuclear power generating stations are now all over the world. At one point it was said space flight would be impossible. There were stories about it being attempted and failing. For instance, hundreds of years ago a Chinese military man had rockets attached to a chair and launched himself. It wasn’t pretty. The first rocket to reach space was the German V-2 A4 rocket on October 3, 1942. The first man was launched into space by the Soviet Union in 1961, he was Yuri Gagarin. Many so called experts had said there would never be light without fire. When ideas were discussed for some substitute for fire those who brought this up were ridiculed. When the lightbulb was first invented those experts still were not happy and some claimed everything about the electric light bulb was a failure. It’s a shame Edison gets the credit for inventing the light bulb when it was really a British physicist and inventor named Joseph Wilson Swan, and he invented it in 1850. Edison came out with his bulb patent in 1880, 30 years later. Doctors believed you would never be able to successfully transplant a heart, just as today many think you will never be able to transplant a brain. Years ago, when talk of pay television was mentioned, people used to laugh. They said no one would ever pay to watch television. It was hard for them to imagine having a service which would replace the 7 channels we had with 150 channels or more. Today cable television is falling to streaming services and almost everyone is paying for some kind of service. In the same vein, we used to laugh at the idea water would be sold. Now it is a big business. Of course, there is a lot of unhealthy water coming out of faucets and we didn’t have this problem years ago. The change in circumstance has really helped the water bottling companies. One has to wonder if at least some of them are somehow involved with all this bad water. Scientists thought you would never be able to alter the speed light travels. They were correct for a long time then a scientist figured out how to substantially slow a beam of light down. As a matter of fact, science can now get light to stop traveling. Today we are being told nothing travels faster than light. Will this be another misguided fact and will we break the light speed barrier? Experts were telling us before television came out that it was an impossibility because of financial and commercial reasons. One scientist told us we shouldn’t be wasting our time dreaming about it. A lot of people when online shopping came out believed it would fail. They claimed people want to be able to physically touch and see in person what they are going to buy. They said online shopping would fail. They said the same for online banking. Just the opposite has happened. Online shopping has been so successful, it has caused many brick and mortar stores to go out of business and online banking is picking up speed every day. I guess the bottom line is the human mind is amazing and can figure out how to create all sorts of things and has been doing this since the beginning of time. It is only getting better at technology and more so called impossible inventions are coming out every year and there doesn’t seem to be any end to it. Perhaps the light speed barrier will fall sooner than we think.
|
