JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
It seeped into recognition that the photo below is remarkable to my experience for showing an early airplane being pushed through a puddle–marsh, actually–prior to flight, and we can see its progress and its helpers in a reflection in the water. Now it is easy to find an aircraft with pontoons made for a watery environment, but the other, well, it seems to be remarkable to me. The photo is from Henry de la Vaux’s heavy and highly illustrated Le Triomphe de la Navigation Aerienne, Aeroplanes, Dirigiables Spheriques, printed in Paris in 1911, and shows the Euro-famous Henri Farman’s Voisin aeroplane across an inundated section of the fields at Issy. Farman used this aircraft (made by Gabriel and Charles Voisin of Aeroplanes Voisin, founded 1905) in March 1907 and “… flew the first successful powered aircraft designed by aeronautical engineer… to make the first heavier-than-air flight lasting more than a minute in Europe, and also to make the first full circle”. (Wikipedia) And yet for that the thing that attracts me to this photo, found serendipitiously while flipping through the pages of the big book, was were the reflection of the underside of the plane in the mirror surface of the wet field. Simple, and unusual.
And the full image:
