before the space program, what was the "standard for scientific achievement comparison"?

Factual Questions
1

Thinking with this week’s anniversary of the moon landing, the tired expression, “Boy, they can put a man on the moon but they can’t…” (make plastic packaging it doesn’t take a blowtorch to open, get pizza right, etc.)

Before '69, what did people use as the standard of comparison for how far we’d come scientifically? I suppose for a few years there you might have heard “Boy we can put a man in space but…”, but before that?

Seems the only previous benchmark I’ve ever heard referenced is slicing bread.

2

Before “we can put a man into space” there was “we can split the atom.”

I don’t know what came before that. My WAG is that it would have been “we can fly.”

3

That saying is pretty new, I dont think its a modification on an old saying.

Before the space race the brainiacs were in physics. Splitting the atom, quantum mechanics, etc. Medical advances in the 1950 and 1960s were pretty impressive too.

4

Sliced Bread?

5

That’d only date back to the late twenty’s; after man learned to fly.
Perhaps “snot on a doorknob”? :wink:

6

“We can put a man on the roof with a ladder, but we can’t…”