36,525 days

At approximately 10:35am on Thursday, December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted a wood-and-cloth contraption on a 12 second, 100 foot flight across the breezy sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  History records that event, the centennial of which is celebrated today, as the very first powered flight.

The progress in air travel made by human beings in a mere 36,525 days since Kitty Hawk is truly remarkable.  Despite the attendant delays, hassles, and irritations, the airline industry affords you and me the opportunity to travel vast distances in a short time.  If I want to, I can be in Paris or New Delhi or Rio de Janeiro tomorrow; I can leave in the morning for a meeting in Denver, and be back home in Seattle for dinner.  What Wilbur and Orville hath wrought!

Only 36,525 days… That’s well under a million hours (876,600, to be precise).  It’s only a tad over 50 million minutes (52,596,000 is what I calculate), just a bit over 3 billion seconds (3,155,760,000).  Even on a human time scale, that doesn’t seem like an immense timespan.  It’s only about one one-hundredth of the 10,000 or so years of human society and culture, and less than the blink of an eye on the geologic scale.

I make no particular point about human endeavor or inventiveness, nor about what our future may hold or portend.  This is simply an expression of marvel about what has happened within a single human lifespan.

Thank you, Orville.  Thank you, Wilbur.

Comments

<< Back to main