From Leonardo da Vinci to the engineers of Bell Aerosystems, some of our finest minds have devoted themselves to finding a better form of travel. Still, anyone can have an off day …
There’s an innocent optimism to transport visionaries. They really thought they could change the world! They absolutely couldn’t! But all respect to them for trying: someone got lucky with the wheel once, didn’t they?
Being a transport visionary must have been more interesting back before technological progress and grotesque wealth allowed billionaires to “disrupt” the boring A-to-B-ness of conventional travel and blast a car into space, just because. Imagine conceiving of human flight back when your only model was birds and some gossip about a guy called Icarus. Or looking at a horse and thinking: “Hmmm, that’s fast, muscular and terrifying; I wonder if I could compel it to take me somewhere, somehow?”
