Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
In its primordial, primitive simplicity it rivaled its sibling. That was the Flyer, a 625-pound flying machine that Orville Wright coaxed into the air, traveling 120 feet in 12 seconds at a height of less than 10 feet above the earth, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17th, 1903. A thousand years from now, to our future ancestors these events will seem almost temporally simultaneous, with hardly a blink of the eye in human history to separate them.
But unlike the Flyer--which, apart from the inarticulate whirring drone of its 12hp engine, was mute--its sibling spoke, quite clearly, to anyone who cared to listen to it. Its vocabulary was limited to a persistent, monotone syllable of varying length. In southern California, my future father-in-law, a radio ham, toggled between the 20.005 and 40.002 megacycle frequencies on which he heard the static-inflected beep-beep-beep-beep of its voice. But to those who heard it, its message was crystal clear.
Though historians hypothesize on when and where the first wheel was constructed and used, the exact date and place of its occurrence are lost to pre-history, before mankind’s collective memory started to pay attention to such events. But we all know that 50 years’ ago, at barely a third of the Flyer’s weight, Sputnik I became the first man-made object to orbit the globe, every 96 minutes,