THE FUSE

Few objects encapsulate the glory and hubris of human creation as well as Concorde, the supersonic airliner developed jointly by Britain and France, which was in service from 1976 to 2003. The culmination of decades of research and a joint development programme that ran throughout the 1960s, Concorde was a stunning technical achievement but also a commercial disaster; it took decades for the aircraft to break even and just 20 were built against projected orders of over 100.