Unbelievable!
A human-powered helicopter has been invented, built and flown by a team of Canadians! Don’t expect to be commuting in one any time soon, but the concept has been proven.
This occurred because in 1980, the American Helicopter Society Igor I. Sikorsky prize of almost $250,000 was offered to anyone who flew a human-powered helicoptor to a height of three meters and hovered there for at least one minute. That might not seem like much, but it took 33 years to get the job done.
Prizes have contributed greatly to aviation. Lindbergh’s flight won the $25,000 Orteig Prize. In the last few years, space flights have won prizes of millions of dollars.
Winner-take-all prizes tend to stir up more effort, ingenuity and creativity than the amount of the prize itself.
But, compare that to the way our guvmint tries to get things done. Often, the guvmint chooses the company the guvmint thinks can do the job, then gives them the prize in advance. More likely than not, the guvmint is wrong.
Remember Solyndra? The guvmint “loaned” the company over half a billion dollars of our money to save the world through solar energy. Solyndra went broke.
Recently, the guvmint did it again. Have you ever heard of the Fisker electric car? The guvmint loaned them over half a billion dollars too — the guvmint seems to like that figure. Fisker produced a handful of cars then it, too, fell on hard times. I’ve read that we taxpayers lost hundreds of thousands of dollars per car produced.
The free market offers a huge prize — after the fact — to winners. The guvmint does it backwards and it doesn’t get results.
