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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Centuries of cranks vindicated by human-powered ornithopter flight
4 thoughts on “The World’s First Helicopters”
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amazing but hahahah at the music
[…] 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. […]