Short movie of Otto Lilenthal - the first man to fly

[Head in the clouds]

A very clever animation created from a sequence of all the original photographs of Otto Lilienthal's historic flights that took place between 1893 and 1896. It's only two minutes long and well worth a look -

 

[MEDIA=vimeo]155960641[/MEDIA]

 

 

[kasper]

Lovely use of technology to recreate something important to flights history.

 

Bit like George Cayley and his gliders - several replicas having been built and flown over time from the 1950's to the 2005 ... search youtube for them.

 

 

[Head in the clouds]

Lovely use of technology to recreate something important to flights history.Bit like George Cayley and his gliders - several replicas having been built and flown over time from the 1950's to the 2005 ... search youtube for them.

Yes, I love to see the origins of things.

 

I have to admit, though, that the title I used for this thread is a little misleading. Otto wasn't the first to fly at all, the Montgolfier brothers were, more than a hundred years earlier. And the first to fly a glider (sometime before 1849) is attributed to an unknown 10 year-old boy and then Sir George Cayley's coachman, footman or butler, John Appleby, to which you correctly alluded kasper.

 

Lilienthal, though, became known as the father of free-flight gliding because he "was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful gliding flights".