When critics asked why he bothered to invent an impractical human-powered flight machine, the keenly intellectual aeronautics engineer Paul MacCready, above, insisted that inventing anything--even if impractical--spawned something critically important: a new way of thinking about the world. In August 1977 the curious, free-spirited inventor unveiled his Gossamer Condor, a winged, 70-lb. (about 30 kg) contraption made of piano wire, aluminum tubing and Mylar, which completed the first sustained human-powered flight. "Your parents will be wrong. Your schools will be wrong," he told a group of schoolchildren in 1998. "If you look for the answers yourself, you will find that you can do better." He was 81.---
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