The idea that you could find a path that makes the more essential things in your life easier,

and that somehow that might be advantageous, you know, is to me as a compelling proposition.

I'm Rufus Griskum, and this is the next big idea.

Today, can success be effortless.

Back in the 1950s, a British industrialist named Henry Kramer became obsessed with the

idea of human-powered flight, so obsessed that he offered a 50,000-pound prize to the first team

that could build a human-powered aircraft and fly it in a figure eight around two pylons spaced

a half mile apart. Now, let's keep the historical context in mind here. Like I said, this is in the 1950s,

1959, to be exact. That means it was more than a half century after the Wright brothers took their

famous 12-second flight. Chuck Yeager had already broken the sound barrier, passenger planes routinely

crossed the Atlantic, and NASA was tantalizingly close to shooting a man into space. Building a

flying bicycle should have been, well, as easy as riding a bike. One team after another tried to

capture Kramer's prize. They built intricate flying machines out of wood and metal and heavy-duty

plastic, but in 17 years, not a single one succeeded. Then along comes an American model plan

enthusiast named Paul McCready. He had a hunch about why all those fancy teams came up short.

They were trying to solve the wrong problem, he thought. They were asking, how can we build the

perfect flying machine? But what they should have been asking McCready realized was how do you build

a plane that you can crash, repair, and redesign as quickly as possible? He decided to answer his own

question, along with a Ragtag team he built what was basically an oversized model airplane

that has bike pedals attached to the propeller. They called it the Gossamer Condor,

and just like McCready promised, it was a cinch to crash and repair. If the aluminum frame snapped,

they'd get a broom handle and some duct tape and put it all together again. An accident like that

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