In 1903, NY Times predicted airplanes would take 10M years to develop
In 1903, New York Times predicted that airplanes would take 10 million years to develop
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Of course the timeframe is wrong, but we did achieve flight exactly as they predict: advancements in materials science that changed the relationship between strength and weight.
Interesting how resistant people are to progress. Why can't they just dream and be excited?
Material science is literally magic
Key word there is "evolve" which may be reasonable with respect to natural evolution of flight but then even human assisted artificial selection operates much more efficiently than that.