“Whatever man builds, all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity. …

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.  It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer. …

“Meanwhile, startling as it is that all visible evidence of invention should have been refined out of this instrument and that there should be delivered to us an object as natural as a pebble polished by the waves, it is equally wonderful that he who uses this instrument should be able to forget that it is a machine. …

“There was a time when a [user]* sat at the center of a complicated works.  The machine of today… dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice. …

“The central struggle of men has ever been to understand one another, to join together for the common weal.  And this is the very thing that the machine helps them to do!  It begins by annihilating time and space.  Little by little, the machine will become part of humanity.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in 1939, marveling at the design elegance and world-changing prospects of the modern airplane.  (From “Wind, Sand and Stars”).  He also died too young.

* Pilot