Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 December 1

= December 1 =

Who laughed at the Wright brothers?
Carl Sagan famously said that "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Who, if anyone, laughed at the Wright brothers? There were plenty of respectable people working on heavier-than-air flight at the time, and there seems to have been a general expectation that such a thing would eventually be possible given suitable engines and materials. So did they in fact laugh at the Wright brothers? If so, who were they, and what was the context? Or is this just a stock element in inaccurate stories told to children, like churchmen telling Columbus the world was flat? --Amble (talk) 05:10, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Alternatively, were they really laughing at the Gershwin brothers? --Amble (talk) 05:16, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, possibly Lord Kelvin. Despite being an excellent physicist and an engineer, he made pronouncements that weren't so hot. Response to Major B. F. S. Baden Powell's request to join the Aeronautical Society, December 8, 1896: "I was greatly interested in your work with kites; but I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of." (However, he never laughed at Bozo the Clown.) Clarityfiend (talk) 06:59, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Here is a large collection of quotations making predictions about aviation. Many of them are favorable, but quite a few are not.  Just looking at the ones from the Wright brothers' era, we have:
 * Thomas Edison, quoted in New York World, 17 November 1895
 * Worby Beaumont, engineer, when asked if man will fly in the next century, 12 January 1900.
 * Rear-Admiral George Melville, Engineer-in-Chief USN, 'North American Review,' December 1901
 * 'Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,' published in the New York Times, 9 October 1903
 * Simon Newcomb, in The Independent: A Weekly Magazine, 22 October 1903
 * Simon Newcomb, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science, 1906
 * Engineering Editor, The Times, 1906
 * Lord Haldane, Minister of War, Britain, 1907
 * I have not attempted to verify the genuineness of any of these.


 * --70.49.170.168 (talk) 18:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC) (The actual time of posting was some hours earlier; I missed signing it originally and Sinebot didn't catch me.)


 * Thanks to Clarityfiend and 70.49. I had in mind people laughing at the Wright brothers in particular rather than aviation in general, but I suppose that's unlikely to have happened before 1903 given their largely unknown status.  It's interesting that many of the objections to powered flight are based on the lack of suitable means of propulsion, which is one of the areas where the Wrights were more clever than the competition (aiming for modest power output and extremely light weight).
 * I found that the Wrights really were laughed at by the European aviation community, but after 1903. This came mainly from people who also thought that powered flight was possible, but doubted that the Wrights had actually done what they claimed.  And much of their skepticism was because of another area where the Wrights were very clever, by giving up the goal of stability and instead coming up with (and exhaustively testing) control techniques capable of keeping an unstable machine pointed the right way.
 * I'll take away an increased respect for the Wright brothers, especially for the ways that their success came from their own wisdom in choosing the right approach rather than just from having come along at the right time. --Amble (talk) 21:04, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Richard Pearse may have spent some years ... not exactly laughing at the Wrights, but maybe more like grimacing. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  07:46, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Gustave Whitehead and William Frost are others who were either whopping fibbers or failed to ask enough people to watch their first flights. It's fairly certain though that if the Wright Brothers hadn't done it, somebody else would have done, in fairly short order. Alansplodge (talk) 17:26, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, but they wouldn't have had the Wright stuff. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:46, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Marriage among the peasants
According to our article on love marriage:
 * According to historian Stephanie Coontz, marriages for love and personal reasons [in Europe] began to appear in the 14th century. It began to become popular in the early 17th century.[...] According to Coontz, the marriages between Anglo-Saxons were organised to establish peace and trading relationships. In 11th century, marriages were organised on the basis of securing economics advantages or political ties.

Which is fine as far as it goes for families in the aristocratic and merchant classes whose continued survival relied on trade and political ties. But what about the huge pile of people at the bottom of the feudal pyramid? As serfs of the manor, they didn't really have much property and virtually no wealth, and they couldn't easily do any work other than farming. How did marriage work for peasants? Did they too have arranged marriages, or were they freer to choose? Smurrayinchester 13:20, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * It will be different depending on time and place, but serfs were typically tied to the land. They weren't allowed to leave to go work or live on someone else's land, and their lord had to approve any marriage. They probably wouldn't be allowed to marry anyone who belonged to another lord. So the number of people they could marry would be small (maybe in the thousands). Marriages could be arranged by the lord, or I suppose by family members, but ideally they could marry whomever they wanted as long as the lord approved. Also, aside from differences in places and time periods, it's also hard to know exactly why serfs and peasants did anything they did, since their actions are typically filtered through someone else who was literate and wrote for or about them. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:53, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * There were differences in status among peasants, and these would have figured into marriage decisions. Family ties were more important in the past than they are today, since in times of illness or trouble, a person's only recourse was their family.  So a young person would rarely have dared to defy their parents' wishes.  Parents would have wanted their children to marry into "good" families, meaning families of equal or greater status than their own.  Status could be measured in terms of the amount and quality of land the family leased or otherwise had access to, favor in the eyes of the feudal lord, connections to the Church, or other qualities. Attraction and sentiment no doubt played a role, as it also often did in arranged marriages among the nobility. (For example, a young male nobleman could sometimes rule a proposed fiancee out because she was too ugly or because she had a disagreeable temperament. Daughters of the nobility probably had less say, but if their parents loved them, even they could sometimes surely influence the choice of their future husband.) The key, though, is that marriage, even among peasants, was not seen as a matter of love, but instead primarily as an economic relationship, and as one moved up the hierarchy, as a political relationship. Marriage was really a lifelong commitment, since divorce and remarriage were virtually impossible, and it did not make sense to enter into such a commitment based merely on a possibly fleeting attraction. Parental wishes, especially for young women, were probably often decisive, along with the approval, where required, of the feudal lord.  Marco polo (talk) 15:39, 1 December 2015 (UTC)