To fly like a bird and swim like a fish have always been mankind’s dreams. In a sense, this is what the field of bionics is all about.

American air force major J.E. Steele coined the term “bionics” at a congress in 1960. It literally referred to “learning from nature to apply to technology”.

The term was new, but the idea was not. Experiments to copy concepts that existed in nature and biological systems have been conducted since the 16th century. However, most of them did not lead to immediate success because bionics that intends to copy nature 1:1 is doomed for failure and has little in common with science.

Nature may supply the idea to scientists, but they then need to apply their scientific methodology to develop a new bionic tool. As history shows, when scientists use nature as an inspiration for technological, independent developments, amazing results can be achieved.