Over at je apostrophe, there's a quote from one of the early conferences on software engineering: "We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes-build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again." I've been reading To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. The book (at least the early chapters) is basically a contrast between the efforts of Samuel Langley at the Smithsonian Instutition and the Wright Brothers. Langley's method was in fact much like what the quote describes: build the whole plane, launch it, and pick up the pieces. The Wrights took a much different approach - these days, we might call it an "Agile" process. One really salient point was that the Wrights insisted on designing an ideal wing by doing actual, frequent experiments with a glider and a human pilot, while Langley concentrated on producing a powered craft but flying it unmanned. Langley's approach became mired in the complexity of balancing weight vs. power - you make the engine more powerful, it adds weight, so you have to add lift, which changes the flying characteristics of the plane. Langley's approach also required that the design decisions be made up front, and frequently he would get only one test flight from a design, because the aircraft was destroyed on landing. The Wrights invented a wind tunnel so they could observe the performance of small prototype wings and make an educated choice of the best performing wing, while all their contemporaries were operating off of untested assertions. The Wrights dealt with the complexity of creating an aircraft that would be controllable in the air, and then dealt with the problem of adding an engine to a craft that was known to fly well. Meanwhile, Langley fixated on the problem of powering the airplane, but never was able to produce one that had good flying characteristics. Langley assembled a large team of engineers and workmen and was constantly running out of money and seeking new sources of funding, while the Wrights worked alone and were mostly self-funded. I'm really enjoying this book because I see a lessons in how the Wrights approached an unexplored problem domain. Boeing and Airbus don't build airplanes like the Wrights, because they have a hundred years of experience to draw from, and because their aims are markedly different. The Wrights just wanted to make something fly, they weren't building a 777. It's also very interesting that the Wrights didn't patent their invention, partly because they believed that the first person to fly wouldn't be the ones to become rich off of the achievement. It seems that they were correct: aviation got its first practical use during World War I and commercial aviation didn't get started until the 1920s and 30s, after their patent would have expired, assuming that they patented it in 1903.