20th in a series

According to yesterday's New York Times, whom I pay good money to keep me informed and entertained:

"On Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful man-powered airplane flight, near Kitty Hawk, N.C."

Man-powered?

Back in the day, before U.S. public schools fell, if we are to believe the Times, to depths so inky that even the fluorescent fish can't see, the textbooks I read called it something different. It went something like this:

On Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful heavier-than-air aircraft flight, near Kitty Hawk, N.C.

The reasoning was, I believe, that this was the first time human beings got something flying around without pumping it full of helium or hot air, thereby making the complete contraption, including all the gas, its containment vessel, and whatever basket-like affair it lifted, lighter than the air around it.

My guess: this was all theory, with no giant bathroom scale to use for fact-checking. Doubtless there are physics theorems that 'prove' this to be true, and if you take a bathroom scale out onto the dunes in North Carolina it's just going to get clogged up with sand, anyway.

First heavier-than-air flight. No helium, no hot air, just an ultra-light air foil and a very heavy metal engine. Move a foil quickly enough through the air and it generates 'lift.' There go those physicists again.

Man-powered? Indirectly, I suppose. Men, in this case Orville and Wilbur, dreamed the thing up, assembled it and got it launched. Using that logic, however, blimps and dirigibles and hot-air balloons, all of which preceded the events near Kitty Hawk, were also man-powered (in the lexicon of the day. Today, dear Times, we would say human-powered, to avoid gender bias and any associated eyebrow lift).

So it appears that the Times had it wrong yesterday. This is fairly disturbing. Can I no longer trust Gail "Have you been wondering what's up with reproductive rights this holiday season? I thought so!" Collins? Should I stop relying on Paul "Great Depression, here we come" Krugman?

And can we trust the Times, who also reprinted the AP's contention that, precisely 66 years after Orville and Wilbur's big day, the U.S. Air Force closed its Project "Blue Book," concluding there was no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships despite thousands of UFO sightings?

I wonder. Maybe we'd better keep watching the skies.

Next year: Who was the real Kitty Hawk, and why did she so suddenly leave show business?