early flight

Portage has some great links to celebrate the upcoming 100th anniversary of the first flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, South Carolina.

This is an image from the LOC American Memory Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers Photography Collection.

Almost by coincidence we chanced upon another Wright image here .
This was found through a wonderful Australian site: Hargrave: Saluting 150 years of Australian Aviation .
The Wright image was suggested as a comparison to the Glider 1909 of John and Reginald Duigan

I know there is that way too much blue thing happening in this post for the time-challenged, but this next blue link to the Aviation in Colour -" a selection of images from the earliest days of aviation, using the then still experimental colour photographic processes " is worth the click.

via barista

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Comments: early flight

The colour stuff is particularly wonderful. The pink and silver in the Eindecker-Rumpler is lovely.

I wonder whether this pilot, or the moustachiod masher with his Nieuport made it through the war?

Or whether they would say of their aircraft what Hedley Kerr wrote in his last diary entry as his boat approached Gallipoli beach and he was handed a pair of wire cutters: "I fear I am being given the keys to the Gates of Heaven."

Sorry. As the cliche says, they were a doomed generation.
Posted by David Tiley at November 7, 2003 06:28 PM

Yes there's always that foreboding within photos of the era. Not sure whether colour enhances it - as with the Romantic feel to the pose in 'Nieuport IIN, 1912' - or helps make it more real and less consigned to a b/w past.
I know when I saw the colour films of D Day on TV it was quite confronting. Colour spliced the eras.

The Hurley image is great too.
Posted by boynton at November 8, 2003 07:29 PM

An interesting point about Hurley - with the Western Front stuff, particularly on film, there are questions being asked about confusion in cataloguing. Some historians (my fanatical but fabulous friend Quentin mostly) say that the non Light Horse stuff is mostly Sir Hubert Wilkins. He is worth a google.
Posted by David Tiley at November 10, 2003 11:05 PM

a 'confusion in cataloguing' angle will always get me googling.
Posted by boynton at November 11, 2003 12:19 PM