Landing on the moon and returning safely only 66 years after the first powered flight and only a few years into the age of transistors and computers was to put it simply, a completely unbelievable accomplishment and without precedent in human history.
Actually, I just plotted the flight distance records from Wikipedia, starting with the Wright Flyer record of .279km in 1903, to 18000km in 1946, to John Glenn's 3 orbits (~120,000km) in 1962 and Apollo 11 distance (~800,000km) in 1969. While the spacecraft points are clearly above the exponential extrapolation of the flight records between 1910 to 1946, they are much less dramatic than the improvement from 1903 to 1915, where flight distance increased by about 4 orders of magnitude. So while the distance flown obviously was without precedent, the rate of improvement was nothing like that of the first decade of flying.
Actually, I just plotted the flight distance records from Wikipedia, starting with the Wright Flyer record of .279km in 1903, to 18000km in 1946, to John Glenn's 3 orbits (~120,000km) in 1962 and Apollo 11 distance (~800,000km) in 1969. While the spacecraft points are clearly above the exponential extrapolation of the flight records between 1910 to 1946, they are much less dramatic than the improvement from 1903 to 1915, where flight distance increased by about 4 orders of magnitude. So while the distance flown obviously was without precedent, the rate of improvement was nothing like that of the first decade of flying.