Summary: The history of aerospace technology is loaded with well connected scientists who resisted change. There were prominent "experts" who thought flight was not to be. The great Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) (President of the British Royal Society) in 1896 proclaimed "I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of". Of course, the following year he also called Wilhelm Roentgen's X-rays an elaborate hoax. As it happens, Roentgen won the first Nobel prize in physics in 1901 for his X-ray discovery. The British Astronomer Royal Richard van der Riet Wooley proclaimed when asked about space travel in January 1956: "Ifs utter bilge. I don't think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing. What good would it do us? It is all rather rot". Could World War II have been ended sooner if jet engines had been implemented earlier in England where a patent had been granted in 1930?
