I wish I had a link to the photo/movie I’m thinking of, but I don’t even know what to search for. Anyway, this is a very famous black and white movie clip of a guy who has fashioned rigid airplane wings for his arms and a conventional tail attached to his waist/back. The clip as usually shown is of him running around with his apparatus, followed by him jumping off a 10 foot rock and belly-flopping on the ground. (IIRC, this clip is used in the movie Airplane!). This is then sometimes followed by him jumping off a bridge into a river. This clip is often shown as part of a montage with other failed aviation experiments (the guy laying down the rocket bicycle, the thing that bounces up and down under what appears to be an umbrella, etc…)
Who is this guy? What is the story behind his flying device, and whatever happened to him? Did he get hurt in any of his crashes?
I know the footage Jet Jaguar is referring to, and this guy is not on the link Nostradamus came up with (thanks, though).
The footage is in the opening of “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines” if you’d like to check further.
Also, I have a hazy recollection of there being more of each of these things, and a lot of others that aren’t aviation-related, in a short film called “Gizmo” that I haven’t seen in a long time.
Do you have a copy of that film with the wacky old aircraft? Those guys are contemporaries of the Wright Brothers, right?
Despite its frequent use in documentary films as an illustration of unsuccessful aircraft designs which preceded the Wright Brothers’ successful 1903 Flyer, the film entitled Aeronautical Oddities in the News (circa 1948) is a compilation of newsreel film clips dating from the mid-1930s. Duplicate copies of this film are not available from the NASM Archives.
I’d suggest sending a message to the reference desk at the Air and Space Museum. That email address is Reference.Desk@nasm.si.edu.
I sent them a question about two of the other contraptions in that footage, which they very nicely answered, so they might be able to answer yours.
And just in case you’re wondering, the “aircraft” that looked like the venetian blinds was the Gerhardt Cycleplane, created by a Professor W. F. Gerhardt (sometimes spelled Gerhart) who had some connection with the University of Michigan.
And the contraption that you see bobbing up and down on the ground before it self-destructs* was the “Sky Car” built by W. P. Kindree, also from Michigan.
I do have the name of the person at the NASM who sent me this info, but I’d rather not post it on this board.
*The part where it self-destructs does not show up in most of the montages, but the NASM’s film archivist (whose name is mentioned in the previous link) has said that does in the original Movietone news reels.