this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I'm making this claim based on the Wright Bros exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and space museum...
One of the genius things that they did was invent scaled testing (I'm not 100% sure I can make this claim, but I'd be happy to learn it I was wrong). Rather than building the device and testing it, which killed a lot of people through history, they built miniature components and tested them individually to prove concepts, and THEN built their production version in iterations.
Like, to test airfoil designs, they built a table top sized wind tunnel, put a miniature airfoil in, and evaluated its performance, and made determinations for the final product. This SIGNIFICANTLY lowered design costs and prototyping at the time.
This also happened to result in an airplane.
Probably helped lower some risk, too.