The Saunterer

Paul B. MacCready on the great practical point of certain commercially impractical projects

    Paul B. MacCready died last week. He had to his credit many commercially impractical projects, including the one that resulted in the Gossamer Albatross, the human-powered aircraft that flew the English Channel in 1979. He once noted a great practical point about certain commercially impractical projects:

There is a value to some way-out impractical projects that are done for prizes, symbolism or the fun of it, where you don’t have to worry about production. You can focus on extremes; when you do that you’re able to go way beyond prescribed limits to new frontiers.

    For a brief biography of Paul B. MacCready, click here.

Viewing all of The Saunterer’s past posts

    One way of pulling up all of the posts made on The Saunterer blog is to go to www.comesaunter.com and in the left column click on the phrase “Click here for the complete archives.”
    Another way is to go to Google and type in the search window exactly the following - “The Saunterer” Romesburg - and when the page comes up go to its bottom and click on the message “. . . repeat the search with the omitted results included.” 
    The Google way has the advantage of providing what amounts to a table of contents of past posts.