The Conquest of the Air

Imagine Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines using docu-drama style and you will get the idea! Both entertaining and informative, producer Alexander Korda’s semi-propaganda film (a potential collaboration with then Prime Minister Winston Churchill) charters the history of men’s effort to conquer the skies.

This film from 1936 offers an insight into the history of aviation, from the truly dark beginnings when ancient Greeks and Romans tried unsuccessfully to fly through the air with the aid of self-constructed wings, to the tower-jumping by various monks during the Middle Ages. We then enter the three R’s: the Renaissance (which saw inventions by Leonardo da Vinci and Tito Burrattini), the Restoration and the Regency period… where ideas and experiments got ever more daring: the discovery of hydrogen, Sir George Caley’s glider and his design for an aerial steam carriage, the first attempts at ballooning (the French Robert brothers, de Rozier and Réveillon etc.)

19th century experiments take us to various countries like England, France, Germany and the States. We witness the short-lived triumph and demise of German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, the ground-breaking invention of the Zeppelin, and the first electric-powered airship flown by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs.

The early 20th century brought us the American Wright brothers and their ‘Wright Flyer’, short-powered flights in France by Romanian engineer Traian Vuia, Danish Jacob Ellehammer’s monoplane, and French Gabriel Voisin’s biplane.
As time went on and technology progressed, other aviation pioneers such as Charles Lindbergh and his ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ plane, as well as Amelia Earhart made history in their own right. It’s not only triumphant archive clips that we see, but also disturbing ones such as the Hindenburg airship disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937.

As we witness the progress of aviation through the ages, some of the historic events are re-enacted, often in an amusing, even slapstick kind of manner. The 1783 balloon flight by Jean-Francois de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes is hilariously demonstrated when the two ‘pilots cum passengers’ begin sweating heavily in the balloon’s basket (powered by wood fire) and are forced to strip off.
Sir Laurence Olivier plays a French nobleman who invites several finely-dressed ladies to accompany him on his balloon flight, and wary crowds keep running for shelter on the streets when yet another attempt is made to ‘fly’ from a church tower.

After a lesson at the destructive use of planes during WW2 we see happy passengers flying safely from one country to another and it is an indication that the age of air travel has well and truly arrived.