A free project on the early pioneers of aviation: Otto Lilienthal, the Wright Brothers, Santos Dumont, Louis Bleriot, Deperdussin, Tiny Broadwick, Amelia Earhart and others...
It was a time of discovery, the mystery of flying was finally uncovered.
I tried to capture the awe that their peers must have felt at that time.
The Wright Glider from 1901 and the first realy successful motorized plane: the Wright Flyer III from 1905
The Wrigth brothers based much on their design on Otto Lilienthal's flying machines, here Doppeldecker-Gleitflugapparat from 1895
In the early days of aviation planes were often named after their owners - in this case the Brazilian Mr. Santos Dumont. It was the first plane to take off without additional starting gear and the first plane to fly successfully outside the US - in France.
To gender-balance this a bit: The first parachute jump from a plane by a woman was accomplished by Tiny Broadwick, aka Georgie Boradwick, in 1913, unofficially twice already in 1912. (She was only 1,5m tall, therefore the name. By the time she retired from parachuting in 1922, she had made over 1100 jumps.
Louis Blériot was the first person to cross the English Channel in an airplane in 1909. He used his Blériot XI, which went on to become an early best-seller of aviation.
The Rumpler Taube (=dove) or Etrich Taube by Igo Etrich was the first airplane being mass-produced in Germany. It found new application a few years later in ... the First World War. (Depressing. It looked pretty cool though.)
The Russian plane Сикорский Илья Муромец or Sikorsky Ilya Muromets was the first plane intended for commercial passenger transport - it included a washroom and a salon. But instead it was eventually used for dropping bombs in WWI
And as a finish to introduce another female record breaking aviation pioneer: Amelia Earhart, the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone, the first to fly to Hawaii by herself and countless other firsts. And her Lockheed Electra, with which she tried to circuit the planet at the equator in 1937, when she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.
