William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (often referred to as ‘Lord Kelvin’) infamously stated (apparently during the time he was president of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) that “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
What I can’t seem to find is the context of this quote. Can anyone help?
I meant to post this in GQ. Could someone please report it?
Done.
I vaguely remember Lord Kelvin saying that, but don’t know the context. I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s axiom: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is very likely right. When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is impossible, he is very likely wrong.”
Moving thread from GD to GQ.
I can’t find any reference to the context, but plenty of reputable places citye it (giving somewhat different dates).
Nevertheless, he shouldn’t have said it. By the time he did, several heavier-than-air craft already HAD flown. To begin with, there was Stringfellow’s well-reported 1848 steam-powered biplane, which I wrote an article about in Teemings:
http://www.straightdope.com/teemings/issue15/calmeacham.html
There were also flights by spring-powered helicopters before 1895. For that matter, Chinese kids had been building and flying little “hand helicopters” for hundreds (if not thiousands) of years before that. Heck, you can make a case for Kites being heavier-than-air flying machines, and Kelvin must have seen those. About the time Kelvin made this statement, George Francis Fitzgerald was making short flights in his glider.
“I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”
“I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of … I would not care to be a member of the Aeronautical Society.” [Source]
“The air-ship, on the plan of those built by Santos-Dumont, is a delusion and a snare. A gas balloon, paddled around by oars, is an old idea, and can never be of any practical use. Some day, no doubt, some one will invent a flying machine that one will be able to navigate without having to have a balloon attachment. But the day is a long way off when we shall see human beings soaring around like birds.” [TLWT, vol. 2, p. 1168]
“They never will be able to use dirigible balloons as a means of conveying passengers from place to place. There never was and never can be any commercial value to any such affair. It is all a delusion and a snare. Santos-Dumont is a very bright young man, but an air ship as planned by him is not practicable.” [Said to reporters after having arrived in New York on April 19, 1902. Quoted in the New York Times, p.2, the next day.]
According to Wiki, Lord Kelvin also not-so-accurately predicted that radio would have no practical use, that X-rays were a hoax, and (in 1900) that all useful discoveries had already been made in physics.
Great list of awful predictions:
http://www.skygod.com/quotes/predictions.html
SmackFu, that list has incredibly good and bad quotes/predictions.
The one from Scientific American circa 1860 almost seem like a hoax it is so good. Too bad Scientific American can get its head out of its ass nowadays.
Did you mean “can’t”?
-FrL-
Haha – yes. “Too bad Scientific American can’t…”
I can’t provide an answer to the OP, but I’ve often wondered what it was that made Lord Kelvin say such a thing – apart from the already successful flying machines CalMeacham mentioned, there’s also just plain old birds, who are pretty clearly heavier than air, and also pretty clearly able to fly, so there’s obviously no technical impossibility to heavier-than-air flight…
This has always led me to assume that their ought to be something missing about the quote, perhaps a qualifier that with the then state of the art engineering heavier than air flight was infeasible, otherwise, it’d imply that Kelvin believed birds have some magical means of achieving flight inaccessible to humans (or maybe he just didn’t get out much).
That is in fact my motive for asking the question in this thread - I’m wondering if the context makes it less ridiculous - maybe he thought that heavier than air flight couldn’t be scaled up beyond birds, or something.
But looking at the transcript of the interview available on the site linked by Anaglyph - here - it really does start to look like he just believed his own opinions a little too strongly. (This interview is apparently not the source of the quote I’m asking about, but it does discuss the same subject matter)
Yes, I realized while writing that my whole post essentially amounted to asking ‘what’s the context of this quotation?’, but I hate to throw things away while they’re still perfectly good, so I decided to put up with the redundancy. 
But it’s still a far cry from calling heavier-than-air flight flat-out impossible – he merely states it is impracticable, and ever will be; a bold assertion, surely, but not quite the denial implicit in the original quotation.
No problem at all - I’m glad it wasn’t just me.
With heavier than air flights already happening, was Kelvin a victim of the poor communication of the time? Were the reports local? Reliable? Believable? One of our TV Stations used to run a montage of footage of, a whole bunch of silly and bizzare ‘flying’ machines from the turn of the 1900’s - some that mimicked bird flight, a lot that mimicked the insanity of their inventors. If that’s the sort of thing Lord Kelvin was used to seeing, it would fit that he’d be skeptical.
Was the context of that statement an unreliable print media?
Leslie Charteris did a nice wee early Saint story about some conman trying to get investors for his prototype ‘helicopter’. The conman demonstrated his machine knowing that it could never go into production - he’d been conned into buying the plans himself. The Saint bought up all the stock, making sure to get receipts for himself and the friends who’d already lost their money. The kick being that, at the time, helicopters were only theoretically possible, but no-one had worked out how to stabilise them. The conman, not realising this, had thought his plans were wrong and engineered his way around the ‘faulty’ design - making the first commercially viable chopper. The conman knew helicopters weren’t profitable, he didn’t know why. The Saint knew that Helicoptors couldn’t fly until he saw one for himself.
Maybe Kelvin ‘knew’ what everyone except the crackpots and looneys knew, and any isolated incident would have to be taken with a grain of salt.
There are conflicting claims about the first flight even now. New Zealand’s Richard Pearce eventually accepted that the Wright Brothers were quicker, but I believe there are some European claims for the title.
Or maybe Kelvin was just a jerk and I should invest in that water powered engine the bloke down the road was hawking.
I really think it was Dr. Simon Newcomb (noted astronomer) who pronounced heavier-than-air flight impossible. The best such prediction was Dr. Earnest Rutherford (nuclear physicist)-the man who correctly identified the structure of the nucleus:
“anyone who is thinking about extracting energy from radioactivity, is talking moonshine!”
-This was just 5 years before Streisman and Meitnor split the atom.
Though cites seem to be lacking, I’ve always understood that the context of the quote is “aerial navigation” - the common name at that time for the idea of manned, controlled, flight. This would account for his not taking much notice of small flying models.
[BTW, your Teemings article contains this: “Curtiss was then involved in a patent lawsuit with the Wright brothers about flight, and took the commission as a way of puncturing the Wright’s claims. Wright was able to make the Aerodrome fly, albeit with extensive modifications”
which should read: “Curtiss was then involved in a patent lawsuit with the Wright brothers about flight, and took the commission as a way of puncturing the Wrights’ claims. Curtiss was able to make the Aerodrome fly, albeit with extensive modifications”]
More to the point, Otto Lilienthal had been making numerous short flights for at least 3 years (indeed, FitzGerald’s glider was a Lilienthal design.)
If you have info about the context of the quote, you should share it – that’s precisely what the OP is asking about. Is this something beyond what you think it should mean?