Conquering Frontiers

Where would we be if there hadn't been people with the courage (and a streak of crazy) to push the envelope, to go beyond where anyone had gone before, to test and try new things.

Take the Wright Brothers, if you've ever seen their first plane, it was held together with nothing but spit and chewing gum. Who in their right mind would have left the ground in that thing. With the appreciation of millions of air passengers today, we honor their crazy courage. Just one more goofball thinking he can fly off the roof of the garage.

Incredible feats like breaking the sound barrier done by Mr. Yeager shown here with the x1, the plane that actually did the deed. He broke speed record after speed record, in at least one case he walked away from a firey crash. The guy had no fear.

Then, of course, there was a search for men with the "right stuff" to graduate from test pilotdom to astronautville, eventually leading us to the moon and where was it we went most recently, Pluto? There's obviously no end to the frontier these men opened up.

But let's back up a little, if it weren't for these two men and this amazing lady, we could be living in Pittsburg right now, or worse yet possibly Cleveland. This was a phenomenal case of collaboration and one of the earliest acknowledgements that women do have value. She left her tribe and trekked across country to lead these two guys and their merry band to the wild, wild west.


Then there's the scientific aspect of our history. Just imagine if Marie Curie had not taken the chances she took with testing and failing and trying again and again to discover radioactivity, the only woman to win two Nobel prizes, the first woman to become a full-fledged professor at the Sorbonne, the only woman to be buried at the Pantheon in Paris. Unfortunately, following her discovery, eventually came her death because she had not yet learned of the dangers of radioactivity and carried it around in her pockets during her years of experimentation.

And last, but certainly not least, we have this gentleman to thank for the invention of the convenience we most appreciate, especially if we are abroad in less populated areas. And just in case you don't recognize him from his picture, his name is Thomas Crapper. So we all know what that means!