Martin JetPack

Story about Martin Jetpack

“As a five-year-old boy in the 1960s, I grew up thinking that we’d have holidays on the moon and flying cars and jet packs,” [Glenn Martin] says. “But when I turned 21, I was quite disappointed to find that we hadn’t gotten them yet.”

Without as much as a second thought, Martin went about changing that.

As a student at the University of Otago in New Zealand, Martin would spend a fair amount of time in the library—especially as a way to stay warm during the winter—and during those prolonged library visits he began to study existing jet pack technology. Unimpressed that then-current examples could fly only for 26 seconds and carry a pilot weighing less than 160 pounds, Martin set out to create a better version. After three and a half years studying the mathematics behind it, Martin [..] built, in his garage, a jet pack that could carry a 220-pound pilot for 30 minutes.

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Interesting point: before building his jetpack technology, Glenn Martin spent years studying the mathematics behind flying. He didn’t just whoop out some powertool and started cutting shit. That’s what you usually see in movies though when inventors are involved in a “I-am-building-something-cool” scene. There might be some kind of “mission music” in the background, dude dances, and goes “yes!”. Surely this appeals to an Artisan’s “tactile” view of living in the now, to a “do it” inclination, but the real work for such inventions go on silently, in the inventor’s head.