They left the wreckage of their dreams entangled with the wreckage of their so-called "flying machine" on the sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills. They went home by train with their tails between their legs and nothing in their future but pedals, wheels and handlebars.
Orville and Wilbur Wright had learned the hard way what everyone had been saying all along:
If God had meant humanity to fly, He'd have given us wings …
It didn't happen, of course. The Wright brothers' Flyer, developed in their Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop and shipped to North Carolina, did get off the ground Dec. 17, 1903, with Orville at the controls, and stayed up long enough to show that mastery of the skies was ours for the taking.
But if science had dictated otherwise, if flight had proved impossible for anything not born with wings, what a different world we'd live in. A slower, perhaps more contemplative place where SARS ﾗ Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ﾗ possibly would never have reached us and where the current conflict in Iraq might well not be happening because we couldn't rain death upon one another from thousands of metres up.
Or could we?
"I take it we'd still have balloons … dirigibles," says Bert Hall. He's speaking slowly, thinking fast. "Would nuclear weapons have been developed? What would be the point? You couldn't deliver them. Unless you make the argument that nukes could be delivered by Zeppelins. Which then couldn't escape the blast. The ultimate suicide mission."
Bruce Powe recalls the ruthlessness of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War.
"Would our last century have been as murderous without planes?" Powe ponders. "Yes, probably. Remember what Sherman was able to do during his notorious march to the sea, razing everything in sight on the ground."
Hall is a professor at the U of T's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Powe is a cultural critic and author known for his jaundiced view of our electronic environment. He used to write his books, including his 1995 novel Outage, by hand. But he's communicating now by e-mail from York University, where he teaches creative writing. He also teaches at Humber College.
Both men are intrigued by the idea of a world without heavier-than-air flight, trying to measure the impact on everything from warfare to Toronto's multiculturalism ﾗ and the very different country Canada would be ﾗ to whether we'd have tomatoes in winter. And then there's rock 'n' roll.
"There'd be no spy-planes, no U-2s," Powe says. "The band would have to come up with a new name."
Hall recalls, "the tomatoes we used to get that were allegedly grown in hothouses. The size, shape and taste of a baseball. There's not a tomato being grown outside a greenhouse within 1,000 miles of us right now. They fly them here from Israel and South America.
"South America … Chilean wine …" His voice keeps trailing off. "California wine. It's all flown in…. Sorry. I just had a reverie of Ontario wine, baseball tomatoes and no winter weekends away in the sun. It's too awful to contemplate!"
It wouldn't just be weekend getaways. Global tourism would be "zilch," he says. "There would still be cruises. But mass tourism to places like Guadalajara, Tenerife, the Caribbean … New York to the Bahamas would be a three-day voyage. These would still be tiny backward islands with high disease rates and none of the income that visitors bring.
"Places like Rome and Paris would be a lot more placid. London wouldn't have those teeming throngs of Americans."
Other countries, says Powe, "would retain mystery, remoteness, strangeness … more sovereign, less permeable. Borders would be more like barriers.
"Canada would probably have stayed smaller, located around the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Railroads helped, but the modern nation of Canada could not exist without flight. Flight consolidated Canada. With the nation's capital in the middle of nowhere, we need flight just to keep the government functioning. Contact in the bush would die without bush planes."
It wouldn't be such a small world, after all. And if Canada were more parochial, that would go for Toronto, too. Having fewer immigrants would affect everything from the range of food we eat to the broadness, or otherwise, of our minds. We might still be Toronto the Good.
"Remember the old guilt-ridden LCBO that looked like a country post office or a hospital dispensary?" says Hall. "You had to fill out a form."
We might also be Toronto the Less Fashionable.
"I don't know where the damned pants I'm wearing were made, but I'll wager it was Malaysia or Romania, somewhere like that," he says. "If the market here for stylish jeans suddenly decides it wants rhinestone crotches, they start work right away in Taiwan or Malaysia and a couple of weeks later we have them in the stores. You couldn't do that with sea freight. So there'd always be a fashion lag."
As for the United States, Hall says, "their dramatic changes vis-�-vis the rest of the world are entirely contingent upon technology … flight. In another world, America would rely upon its navy. It would protect itself with a strong surface fleet, as it did in the 19th century, and regard itself as different from the rest of the world and immune from their troubles."
Which brings the conversation back to warfare.
"No Battle of Britain, no bombing of Dresden, no Hiroshima, no carpet-bombings in Vietnam, no napalm," says Powe. "The war in Kosovo would have had to be a ground war. Would we have fought it then? Gulf War II would require much more ground and naval support. The logistics for such large-scale long-distance conflicts might be too forbidding even for the world's last superpower."
That's if the concept of a superpower even existed.
The absence of aircraft, Hall believes, wouldn't have much affected World War I. But would World War II have happened?
"Yeah … eventually," he says. "It would have been a European war, localized, maybe much less deadly. The Japanese would not have been able to act as they did … no Pearl Harbor.
"The whole Nazi doctrine of blitzkrieg was a combined philosophy of aircraft and artillery. Without that, World War II would have looked like World War I, a two-dimensional war fought in trenches. Without aerial bombing, lots of the old city of London would still be there, all the old churches that were destroyed, and almost any German city you could mention."
What about rockets? The German V-2s, for instance, that toward the end of the war used to fall on London without warning and with deadly results.
"Rockets, strictly speaking, don't fly," says Hall. "But a lot of rocketry was developed out of aviation. Guidance and control and range required a lot of aviation-based knowledge."
Without a space program, "we still wouldn't know our planet is blue … that we are a water planet," says Powe. On the other hand, without satellites in orbit (and thus no high-speed Internet or 500-channel TV), "we would not be under surveillance from the sky. Would this make people less paranoid?"
All our efforts and ingenuity would have gone into land- and sea-based transportation.
"The bullet trains in Japan, the TGV in France, the new Mag-Lev trains that Germany is developing … they illustrate what can be done," says Hall. "I took a train from Berlin to Dusseldorf. We were doing 250 km/h and it was as smooth as silk. You'd have those speeds for goods haulage and probably reserved high-speed lines to move goods by night, passengers by day."
Powe isn't thinking of speed.
"The rhythm of the world would slow down," he says. "The living pace would be less frenetic. Our concepts of time would alter. Time would be meant for contemplation, for conversation and contact, for commerce close to home. Not everything would be focused on `now.'
"Perhaps we would have discovered that our minds have even greater powers than we previously suspected. Perhaps we would build our towers even higher, or allow buildings to float above us."
We had a taste of a flightless world after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. "I remember the eerie feel of silent skies … a jolt to our senses," says Powe.
But humanity would still dream of taking to the air.
"Flight would retain its wonder," he says. "The Icarus myth would be central to our culture.
"If we didn't have airplanes, then our guardian angels would have less trouble keeping track of our whereabouts."
The Toronto Star
