“It can’t be done,” “you’re crazy,” “it’s unachievable.” How many times in history have engineers and creators of groundbreaking works heard these phrases? Far more often than you might think.
And they were spoken even before projects that are now global symbols of ingenuity and foresight were realized.
1. Brooklyn Bridge
Even before construction began, the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the most iconic bridges in New York, was dismissed as an impossible illusion. No one believed that a suspension span over 480 meters could hold, nor that pneumatic caissons could support such massive towers in the East River bed.
Yet, while critics declared it doomed, each completed section of this New York bridge proved the skeptics wrong: the project was no longer a wild idea but a challenge taking shape, steel by steel.
2. Channel Tunnel (Eurotunnel)
Many considered the Channel Tunnel an absurd undertaking: digging over 50 km, with around 39 km of undersea tunnel, including two parallel railway tunnels and a service tunnel? A risky endeavor defying both geology and economics.
Yet, while detractors predicted the failure of the Eurotunnel, the mechanical moles advanced, meeting each other with a horizontal deviation of just 358 mm and a vertical deviation of 58 mm. A precision that effectively proved the Channel Tunnel could be done.
3. Panama Canal
The Panama Canal history is one of a kind. When proposed, the Panama Canal seemed to many like an oversized project: cutting through 80 kilometers of isthmus in a hostile climate, with torrential rains and constant landslides, appeared both technically and economically impossible.
But while skeptics wrote it off, dredgers and explosives began moving millions of cubic meters of earth. In just a few years, the dream of Panama Canal construction became a navigable waterway, with the Panama Canal locks marking a key achievement.
4. Long Beach International Gateway Bridge
At first, many doubted that such a massive bridge could be built over one of the busiest ports in the United States. But Webuild embraced the challenge by participating in the construction of the Long Beach International Gateway, managing the works without interrupting the continuous flow of ships and vehicles.
Thus, the Long Beach Bridge, once considered overly ambitious, became a new landmark, visible from miles away.
5. Television
When John Logie Baird, the inventor of the television, demonstrated the first television model in London in 1925, reactions were lukewarm. The following year, Lee de Forest declared the idea “economically unsustainable” and unworthy of investment.
Even two decades later, the notion that people might gather every evening in front of a box was mocked by the film industry: in 1946, Darryl Zanuck claimed people would quickly tire of staring at a “plywood box.”
We know how that turned out.
6. Airplane
In 1901, after several failed glider experiments, Wilbur Wright predicted that human flight would last less than 50 years. Yet in 1903, the Wright brothers, the airplane inventors, managed to fly their first airplane for about 12 seconds.
Despite the excitement it generated, in 1911 French General Ferdinand Foch dismissed airplanes as “interesting toys” with no military value. Today, however, roughly 100,000 airplanes take to the skies every day.
