Hero of Alexandria invented the aeolipile, a primitive steam engine, in the first century. A hollow sphere with elbow-shaped tubes mounted on an axle and suspended over a cauldron of boiling water, the engine likely could not have powered anything. “It should probably be remembered,” wrote historian William Rosen, “as the first in a line of engineering dead ends.”

“Utter damned rot!” is what William Berryman Scott, a former president of the American Philosophical Society, said in response to Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, first proposed in 1912. “Wegener is not seeking the truth,” said a doubtful geologist, “he is advocating a cause and is blind to every argument and fact that tells against it.”

The earliest reliable account of human flight concerns a Benedictine monk named Eilmer, who in 1066 fastened wings to his hands and feet, jumped from a tower, and glided more than six hundred feet before falling from the sky and breaking both his legs. He blamed the failure on not having fitted himself with a tail.

Members inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010 included Yvonne Brill, whose electrothermal hydrazine thruster keeps satellites in space orbit, as well as Arthur Fry and Steven Silver, who created sticky notes (Fry, the concept; Silver, the glue). “Note: It took one woman to invent a rocket thruster,” wrote a Washington Post reporter about the induction ceremony, “and two men to invent Post-its.”