December 17th is the anniversary of the Wright Brother's first flight. 25-odd years ago we visited the Wright Memorial at Kitty Hawk. I had not expected to be so moved. It's a particularly special place.
From the top of the hill, I could watch small planes take off and land at the OBX airport. Since that day in 1903, air travel has become commonplace, drones take our point of view into the sky, and the moon is reachable. From typewriters and horse carriages, we've come to computers and electric vehicles in an amazing century.
Switching now to botany, in 1903 there was the publication of A Text-Book of Botany (Strasburger, et al.).
It's remarkable how much has changed in the past 122 years: DNA, electron microscopy, PRC, and more. The Table of Contents has chapters on the Choripetalae and Sympetalae(!). Systematics has definitely changed our phylogenetic trees. Even so, I still find joy working with my plant press and my dried specimens, just like botanists have for centuries.
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