Expérience du ballon dirigeable de M. Santos-Dumont: II. Le ballon et son moteur

Lumière brothers captured here one of the first balloons created by aviation pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont in France. It is curious to see the way he controls the machine, a motorized dirigible and one of his most revolutionary creations, one of many he created in the early 1900's until the very first heavier-than-air airplane 14-Bis that was able to fly for a longer period than his balloons and the rest is history.

Due to the low angle in which was filmed and since those old cameras from cinema's initial period were estatic and didn't move it might look for viewers to actually believe that the balloon is taking off, it feels as it stuck with ropes coming from a nearby construction. But we can see engine blades move, the manual control of which Dumont keeps moving and always checking the aircraft's position and direction, carefully analyzing its pecularities and taking mental notes to see what can be changed or kept on his next project. It's a successful flight - we know he had other more disastrous that ended in accidents, all of which he survived - but it wasn't the idea he wanted to achieve since those balloons always had some trouble and never got for too long in the air.

My recommendation for this movie is to see an aviation pioneering register captured by the Lumières, easy to watch and appreciate the genius of Dumont. 9/10

Here is the second movie of two that the Lumieres made of Alberto Santo Dumont and his marvelous dirigible balloon. The first showed the dirigible emerging from its hangar. This one shows the pilot perching precariously in front of the motor as it floats up, down, and forward.

It was quite an achievement, and made Santo Dumont's Brazilians quite proud. Even though the dirigible has fallen out of general use -- except for the Goodyear Blimp, which seems to show up at major sporting events -- for a while it looked like it was going to be the transportation of the future. Then, of course, the Hindenburg exploded.