Ah, the early 20th century, a time of innovation, industrialisation, and some downright dicey fashion choices. Chief among the era’s dreamers were Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. An unlikely duo to radically shift how humans perceived the skies, but nevertheless, they did it. Now, with an imaginary twist of time’s fabric, let's imagine these pioneering lads with a DJI drone in hand, assisted by today’s GPS technology. Buckle up your seatbelts, as we’re about to take off into this hypothetical historical flight of fancy!
A Foundation of Flight
First, let's start with a quick history lesson to remind everyone of the setting. The infamous Wright Flyer took to the skies (almost, well, sort of) in 1903 at Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, a place that sounds suspiciously like the set of a Steven Spielberg movie, but I assure you, it’s very much real. Built on a wing and a prayer, more prayer than wing, to be frank, they achieved the first powered, sustained flight by a heavier-than-air craft. Commanded by Wilbur, their sputtering contraption hopped from the gravelly earth for a mere 59 seconds. The brothers were elated, such as one can be with an icy Atlantic breeze whipping through one’s Edwardian moustache.
If Drones Ruled the World
Now, let's throw drones into this airborne equation. One can imagine Orville casually yawning off, "Oh I say, Wilbur, what if we, dare I suggest, minimise ourselves and the Flyer to a minuscule model size and then see what happens!" Enter the modern concept of a drone, reducing human payload woes and potentially increasing trial-and-error success rates. Not to mention, dodging treacherous tasks from actually flying the rudimentary machine themselves!
How about GPS, for one? Instead of grappling with the inner workings of wind currents and using every molehill as a makeshift runway, the brothers could have tinkered in their shed, fiddling about with code instead. With GPS, they might have set a dastardly daring drone flight path from Dayton, Ohio to an onlooking puddle duck with nary a wink. Less of "Are we there yet?" and more of "Arrived by mobile notification!"
Amazon of the Skies?
As trivia would have it, aviation wasn’t always in the Wright brothers' destiny. They first marketed themselves as purveyors of bicycles, then changed routes, aiming for the airways! With drones, Amazon’s mission envisaged in 2013 by modern mogul Jeff Bezos to deliver parcels could have been implemented much earlier. The Wright bros may have swapped wheels for propellers and found themselves musing over prime deliveries. "Our latest model can drop parcels into your basket before you set the kettle on." Bonkers? Probably. Brilliant? Definitely!
The Sky’s the Limit
Historians could debate night and day whether Wilbur might have loop-de-looped the competition in East London’s bustling Spitalfields Market, with drones carrying avocados to impatient Victorians. No longer would cheap footmen be deployed to deliver mail on foot, clogging up cobbled streets. Instead, visions of buzzing contraptions overhead could have emerged no less than 100 years early. How quaint, and yet, how perturbing a sight before rationing was enforced during the Great War. Dreary as those war years were, one could have found sport, escaping gloom and doom, by indulging in aviation inventions and speculative deliveries.
Picture meeting the Wright brothers, now contemporaries of ours with updated wardrobes and tech-friendly attitudes. Behind their stern Edwardian exteriors could lie hidden joyful souls filled with anticipation at flying drones over every pub in town, adjusting flight paths with a smartphone for ultimate efficiency. Rumour has it they’d pilot sorties delivering the very first cups of cold brew to local bohemians inclined to opine on base human instincts, the scandal!
The Bottom Line
Ultimately, drones and GPS technology would have offered the Wright brothers the precision and efficiency they dearly craved in their precarious aviation pursuits. Perhaps they’d have landed deals of unimaginable proportions, executing their first controlled, powered flight before their slippers got soggy on that fateful December morn in 1903.
Today, from a mountain of modern conveniences, we take our hats off to Messrs Orville and Wilbur. Their flying dreams are reincarnated endlessly by tech enthusiasts who deliver below and beyond the stratosphere with drones. In our parallel universe, they’d likely sit outside quaint coffee shops, mocking seagulls with programmed efficiency and pondering the occult potential of drone cafes. Curious, isn’t it? Ah, technology, where the line between dreams and reality is but an app on a smartphone.
