Wilbur and Orville Wright would have laughed at the sight. The Boeing 747 squats on the factory floor, a fat-bellied, hump-backed behemoth weighing 400 tons.

This beast? Fly? Not a chance, the Wright brothers could have told you.

The Wrights' historic first flight in December 1903 covered all of 120 feet. Had they launched their aircraft at the back of the Boeing 747's economy section, they wouldn't have made it to first class. But they got far enough. What the Wright brothers began on the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., transformed the world.

Aircraft changed the way wars are fought. They shrank the world so that now, there's almost no place on Earth that can't be reached in less than a day from any other place. Flight paved the way for the space program and an escape from the planet.

Airplanes not only lifted people and packages, says Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. They also carried our imagination aloft. "Before 1903, you heard, 'If God had meant for us to fly, He would have given us wings.' After 1903, people said, 'If humans can build a machine to take us into the air, what can't we do?"

America's involvement in World War II began and ended with the airplane. In December 1941, Japanese warplanes attacking Pearl Harbor shook the United States out of its isolationism. Four years later, a Boeing B-29 SuperFortress called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In between, the United States produced nearly 300,000 military aircraft, including the first practical helicopters.

After the war, jet and rocket engines took aircraft faster, farther and higher. Test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first man to travel faster than sound, hitting nearly 700 mph in a rocket-powered Bell X-1 during a flight in October 1947.

In the 1960s, the X-15 rocket-propelled plane flew higher and faster than any other airplane. It hit 4,520 mph and soared high enough to earn its pilots astronaut's wings. By then, however, the greatest glory in the skies was going to the space program.

But aircraft have continued to progress. The Boeing 747, the world's largest commercial jetliner, is a prime example. It can carry more than 400 passengers and fly them 8,300 miles without refueling. More than 1,230 of the jumbo jets have been made since 1969, and they have carried 2.2 billion passengers.

Thirty years later, the enormous plane still impresses. The Boeing Co. assembles the jetliners in a factory that the company claims is the world's largest building--98 acres under one roof. It needs the space. A 747 has 6 million parts, 171 miles of wiring and five miles of tubing. It contains 147,000 pounds of aluminum and has a tail that reaches 63 feet high, the equivalent of a six-story building.

What's the latest in aeronautical technology? Only a few privileged people know, aerospace writer Bill Sweetman says. Many observers believe a supersonic aircraft known as Aurora is being tested at the U.S. government's top-secret Area 51 in Nevada.

But it doesn't take secrets to impress. Sweetman advises simply looking skyward, wherever you happen to be. "I think what would most amaze somebody from 1903, if they were around today, would be that there are so many airplanes," he says. "They're as routine as trains were in the 19th century. They're flying everywhere."

Oceans are puddles to be jumped. Mountains are speed bumps. Just about the only place without regularly scheduled jetliner service is Antarctica, in winter.

Go down to the local Safeway and notice the fresh crab meat from Thailand. Go to www.horse-ex.com and you can order up a thoroughbred from New Zealand. Your pretty, unwilted flowers may have started to bloom in South America. Call an 800 number and you can have a genuine New York City pizza delivered anywhere in the world. You can send a package in the afternoon from Japan and it will arrive the next morning in Washington. Federal Express has a fleet of 600 planes delivering to 210 countries.

The planet is 24,901 miles in circumference--a number that simply isn't very impressive anymore. Earth is now sort of … cute.

Want to use Linda's mobile phone? Just speak into the bikini. Bikini phones, T-shirt Internet links and even baby-tracking nappies are close to a store near you. The American company InfoCharms believes its high-fashion wearable computers will replace the mobile phone within a few years.

The company has just unleashed its range of wearable computers in fashion shows in America and Tokyo, and InfoCharms president, Mr. Alex Lightman, says wearable computers could render boxy personal computers obsolete.

"These are for the chic, not for the geek," he says. "We will be making clothes that look as good or better than current standards."

So, fancy a chip sewn into your son's shoe, so you can track that he doesn't stray on to the wrong side of the tracks? Or a jacket that allows you to switch on the TV, check your phone messages, tell the oven to start cooking the family meal and pinpoint your exact location--all with just a few pokes of the finger and no wires attached?

Welcome to InfoCharms' almost surreal world of inexpensive clothing-integrated, wireless computers. Amazingly, most of these products are close to being released.

The latest from the cyberworld: an aspirin-size computer that, embedded in household appliances, could let people on the road or at the office use the Internet to cool their homes, heat coffee and tape TV shows.

Believed to be the smallest such computer ever built, the inexpensive device could help usher in a new generation of connected home appliances, from VCRs to coffee makers to small cameras, controlled over the Internet from almost anywhere.

“The implications of this are more than a silly little competition among a bunch of researchers,” said H. Shrikumar, who studies specialized machine automation at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “This has tremendous application in the way it might change our lives.”

The project also testifies to how much utility a concise programmer can pack into a limited amount of computer memory, even in these days of multimegabyte software applications with millions of lines of code.

The tiny computer, slightly larger than the head of a match, is connected to the Internet from Shrikumar’s apartment near the university. It includes a tiny 4-megahertz processor he bought for 49 cents and a small 32-kilobyte memory chip that stores World Wide Web pages and other data.

Can Be Built for Less Than a Dollar

Although those numbers are paltry compared to the speed and storage of modern personal computers, which run thousands of times faster and contain hundreds of times more storage, the tiny computer still is more powerful than typical computers less than a decade ago.

Shrikumar, 33, said his computer can be built for less than $1, making it practical to install the devices in a variety of home electronics and appliances.

Some existing appliances, such as modern thermostats or newer coffee makers, can be programmed individually. But appliances connected using the language of the Internet, called “TCP/IP,” could communicate with each other even if made by different manufacturers.

Similarly, with the appliances connected to a home network that also maintained a continuous connection with the Internet, consumers could use the Web browser on an office computer to program their VCRs, turn on their porch lights, even activate cameras to check on the baby sitter.

The Smallest Computer

The new wave of high-speed Internet connections using cable TV modems or new digital phone lines already offer such continuous hookups.

“I’m not sure I want a computer in my refrigerator that’s controllable, but the heating system, that’s a legitimate one you’ll want to control,” said Richard Smith, president of Phar Lap Software Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., who built the first small Internet computer more than two years ago.

“This could solve the problem of programming the VCR. You could have more sophisticated control mechanisms, have different time schedules on the weekdays,” Smith said.

Just about every computer user has had the urge to throw their machine out the window. What if that computer could sense what makes a person frustrated or happy and react to that? At an upcoming symposium, researchers at MIT's Media Lab will show how that might happen. 1999 Sens*bles conference, which will be held 20 October, will look at computers that ‘will become emotionally intelligent and responsive: a world of assistants that just happen to be hardware and software, rather than human,’ according to the conference literature.

‘The idea is to present the latest in where we are with computers in terms of feelings,’ says Rosalind Picard, associate professor at MIT's Media Lab, who will be a presenter in the morning session. ‘We want to make machines that are not only intelligent in the traditional sense, but also emotionally smart.’ By building on the Wearables conference held at the Media Lab in 1997, event organizers hope to take the next step where computers are not only worn, but become emotional, washable, malleable, and perhaps even ingestible.

Plunging deeply into a microscopic world that promises ultrafast, low-power computers, a research team has for the first time fashioned simple computing components no bigger than a single molecule.

The achievement, reported in Science magazine, opens a new window onto a once speculative but now increasingly probable vista of molecular-scale sensors, computers and machines.

The researchers, from Hewlett-Packard Co. and the University of California at Los Angeles, envision a world in which supercomputing power is so pervasive and inexpensive that it literally becomes an integral part of every manmade object.

Over the next decade, such technology "holds the promise of vast data storage capability," said Phil Kuekes, a physicist and computer designer at Hewlett-Packard, which is based in Palo Alto. And ultimately, he said, it could create a new class of "Fantastic Voyage"-style machines, like sensors traveling within a person's bloodstream, issuing alerts if health problems are encountered.

Molecular computing is rapidly becoming a Holy Grail for many computer scientists because it promises immensely more powerful and versatile computers.

James Heath, a UCLA chemistry professor who is leading the research with Hewlett-Packard, described the possibility of computers 100 billion times as fast as a Pentium III microprocessor. He also suggested that it may some day be possible to replicate the power of 100 computer work stations in a space the size of a grain of salt.

To illustrate the density possible at the molecular level, Tour said that a mouthful of water contains so many molecules that, if they were each represented by a sheet of paper, the stack would reach from the earth to the sun 400 million times. "A single molecular computer could conceivably have more transistors than all of the transistors in all of the computers in the world today," he said.

An Israeli scientist has developed a model for a tiny computer that one day will be made of biological materials. It will work inside the human body to detect when something goes wrong, and create a drug to repair it. Professor Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, points out it will take years to develop his blueprint into a biocomputer the size of a single cell that can be implanted into humans. Shapiro says, "A biological computer will sense the body's chemistry. It could sense anomalous biochemical changes in the tissue and decide, based on its program, what drug to synthesize and release in order to correct the anomaly."