The World’s First Helicopters

Energy & Sustainability
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This is a wonderful collection of black-and-white newsreel footage, assembled by the company that invented the newsreel, showing a montage of early helicopter prototypes in all their wacky and frequently-terrifying glory. It’s a highlight reel, about two minutes long, and the various clips that went into it are indexed, annotated, and available for watching in their entirety at the link below, which is a level of background detail we don’t often see in online video. [Thanks, Laura!]

The History of the Helicopter: Early Helicopter Footage

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4 thoughts on “The World’s First Helicopters

  1. Afina Elma says:

    amazing but hahahah at the music

  2. MAKE | Human-Powered Helicopter Prize Finally Claimed says:

    […] Da Vinci would be proud. After 33 years, the straight up difficult challenge of a human-powered helicopter has finally been solved. Or rather, reaching the 3-meter mark and staying afloat for at least 60 seconds has finally been solved. After successfully launching a Kickstarter campaign last year the Toronto-based team behind Atlas have officially been awarded the $250,000 Sikorsky prize. Pedal power was always a natural fit for this competition, and perhaps the real challenge was maintaining altitude inside of a 10×10 meter box; the Atlas eventually drifted to the 9.8m mark! Congratulations to all the makers involved in this successful feat. […]

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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