The other thing is that these kinds of "misunderstood heroic ignored genius" tales are complete bollocks. In reality there was always an existing idea out there before these "revolutionary innovations".
For example, people had been imagining flying for millennia before the Wright brothers. Leonard da Vinci had drawn hang-gliders and helicopters hundreds of years before and there was the myth of Icarus thousands of years before that. Our distant ancestors even "flew" through the trees. People also have flying dreams, before they've even flown in reality and they probably had flying dreams thousands of years ago too. It's not a new idea so no wonder people weren't that amazed when the Wright brothers flew. There are never any truly new ideas, only remixes and hybrids of existing ones, e.g. Relativity was Einstein's synthesis of ideas from (among others) Poincaré and Lorentz and you can trace their ideas back too.
In my opinion, it is wrong to believe in the two extremes: That there were no revolutionary innovators or to ignore previous work in some areas.
When Wright brothers did their test, planes were already flying thanks to the innovation of lots of other people.
But planes could fly without control and crashed. A solution was needed and the Wright brothers provided it expending very little money: flexing the wings.
The fact that they could come with the first valid solution provides a lot of value for society, in the same way of solving the nuclear problem by slowing the neutrons with heavy water(a crazy idea from a single guy) gave America an advance over the Germans.
The same could be said about the problems yet to solve: who will make the first viable fusion nuclear reactor?
It has to be noted that while the Wright brothers invented flexing the wings, they did not invented ailerons, but a twisting mechanism that was not practical, but they were awarded a patent anyway on them for several reasons ( American protectionism being one of them).
Those patents make America aviation industry lag behind other nations and forced the Government to act.
Having an idea or theory is one thing, but putting it into practice is something completely different.
It's not hard to imagine going to Mars and live there, or even have a bunch of theories on how this would be possible in practice. Doing it however, takes a lot more than that.
I can't imagine current media completely ignoring this when it would actually take place, which basically did happen with the Wright brothers.
Ideas and theories only prove their worth when something practical is done with them.
Not so. Having an idea isn't easy. Relativity was "just" an idea long before there was any practical application of it, and it was "just an idea" that took a lot of work. It's simply not true that ideas are easy but practical application is hard. Actually the reverse can be true, sometimes an idea can take a lifetime to develop while the practical applications are trivial by comparison.
Nor is it true that "Ideas and theories only prove their worth when something practical is done with them". This one really sends me actually! There's currently no application for theories of black holes, but those theories are worthwhile in their own right, for if there's anything that makes humans worthwhile, it's their ability to conceive of such ideas as black holes. Physics and mathematics, art and music are valuable in themselves regardless of practical application because they are edifying, beautiful, they are something we can be proud of amidst all our failings as a species. So if we wipe ourselves out, by nuclear weapons or some such stupidity, or if we are wiped-out by an asteroid, even if we never reach Mars, future intelligences may find our writings and movies and learn that we dreamed of going to Mars.
First of all sorry you got downvoted, because this is actually a pretty good response.
You are indeed correct that not all ideas (or theories) are easy. I think in the case of flight the practicality dominates the theories because they have to be combined just right to actually work.
Whereas your example of relativity, it's indeed the theory that is the hardest part (and Einstein got the proper recognition for that, not the one who practically applied it).
Going to make a weird comparison here, but it's basically like a chicken coming out of an egg. We only see an egg at one moment, and the next there is a chicken coming out. We don't really notice there has been a lot of stuff going on within the egg a long time before it came out. Seems the same as with innovations or discoveries. Suddenly it seems to be there.
But I stand corrected that it's not always the practical application that dominates, sometimes it's indeed the theory that is the biggest achievement.
I didn't say developing an existing idea was easy, I just said it wasn't entirely original; that all ideas are the result of breeding between existing ideas is no measure of how hard are to develop!
For example, people had been imagining flying for millennia before the Wright brothers. Leonard da Vinci had drawn hang-gliders and helicopters hundreds of years before and there was the myth of Icarus thousands of years before that. Our distant ancestors even "flew" through the trees. People also have flying dreams, before they've even flown in reality and they probably had flying dreams thousands of years ago too. It's not a new idea so no wonder people weren't that amazed when the Wright brothers flew. There are never any truly new ideas, only remixes and hybrids of existing ones, e.g. Relativity was Einstein's synthesis of ideas from (among others) Poincaré and Lorentz and you can trace their ideas back too.