Solar roads are more practical than they sound

In August 1901, after a difficult month testing their glider in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur Wright was inclined to give up. On the train back to Dayton, Ohio, he told his brother Orville that "not within a thousand years would man ever fly."

The Wright brothers' critics were hugely skeptical of them, too. After all, the notion that humans might take to the skies seemed fantastical and utopian at the time. Critics cried "Icarus!" European newspapers were derisive; a French one called the brothers "bluffeurs" (bluffers).

But the brothers continued experimenting, and of course, Wilbur proved his critics (and himself) incredibly wrong.