When the steam engine was invented and first was used to haul carriages on a bed of steels rails, Victorian doctors of science and medicine warned that the human body could never handle such a strain as to be hurtled along at 30 miles an hour. The speed of a galloping horse was about as fast as the human frame could endure, sceptics warned.
Fast forward to the skies over New Mexico on Sunday afternoon when Felix Baumgartner stepped into the unknown.
The Austrian daredevil, in a stunt bordering the blurred line between lunacy, scientific endeavour and the pursuit of greatness, took a small step from a helium-filled capsule on the edge of space and took a giant leap.
What goes up has to come down once the binding ties of Earth’s gravity are involved — a law of physics so clear and fundamental that our very survival on this spinning rock around the sun depends on it.
Baumgartner’s feat was to freefall from 39 kilometres high — where air is so thin that life exists in all but a vacuum.
He became a bullet, dropping towards ground at a speed of Mach 1.24 — the first man to ever break the sound barrier without jet or rocket.
Fearless Felix needs to be lauded — asking “why not” has brought us all on a wondrous journey of human development so far.