ABSTRACT
The year that I was born was some nine years after the December when the Wright brothers launched their first successful aeroplane flight at Kitty Hawk. For another twenty years the flight of a plane across the skies of the city where I lived continued to result in a rush from the houses to the yards and surrounding field to watch, as the splendid thing thrust its weight against the pull of gravity and gave its pilot an hour or so of bird-like freedom in the air. My grandchildren now hardly spare a glance into the sky as tremendous jet planes boom overhead on journeys to what far part of the world. These same children have even become blasé about the flights into outer space and the dispatch of insect-like machines on probes of Mars and Venus and beyond. Such is our capacity to accept as commonplace and unexceptional the miracles that technology produces. Very little merits a second look these days. Things once considered mere dreams have achieved reality, and the impossible becomes a challenge.
