Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent

The headline would be a good quote for "Sailing Wisdom" in the JSA summer newsletter, the Ditty Bag. It might also come under "Where are they now?" in which former junior sailors grow up using the skills they learned at the helm of a small boat.

This quote comes from Paul MacCready who was best known as the designer of the Gossamer Albatross that won the prize for the first controlled human-powered flight over the 23 mile English Channel in 1979. He died recently and reading his obituary (also here) I found that this crossing was not the first time he made waves crossing a channel - when he was 8 years old he shocked his parents by piloting his sailing dinghy from their home near New Haven across Long Island Sound.

By his teens he had moved from sailing on water to sailing in the air, building model airplanes from scratch - exotic contraptions like ornithopters (with flapping bird wings) to autogyros (rotary winged airplanes). "I was always the smallest kid in the class," he told the National Aviation Hall of Fame. "And so, when I began getting into model airplanes, and getting into contests and creating new things, I probably got more psychological benefit from that than I would have from some of the other typical school things," he said. "Nobody seemed to be quite as motivated for the new and strange as I was." By age 16 he had his private pilot license.

After serving as a Navy aviator in WWII, he got involved with sailplanes (gliders that use thermal updrafts to soar like birds). He set sailplane altitude records and won a series of National Soaring Championships and was the first American to win the World Champion Soaring Contest. Spending time among the updrafts and clouds helped make MacCready became an expert meteorologist as well and he invented a system that is still used to calculate optimum flight speeds between thermal updrafts (the equivalent of "lift" for sailors).

And about that quote. It's taken from MacCready's speech on innovation at the Smithsonian Institute, the full version is:

• Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
• Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
• Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
• Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
• Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.