Filmmaker Animates German Aviation Pioneer Otto “Glider King” Lilienthal’s Historic Flights
What a sight it would have been to behold at the time; a man flying in the air. Naturally his exploits drew a lot of attention, and as mentioned in the video below, plenty of photographs had been taken from every angle of Otto Lilienthal’s experimental flights.
Lilienthal, dubbed the “Glider King”, was the first man to fly in the 1890s. The aviator made his own wings and frequently tested his inventions in Berlin, Germany. His flight attempt at Lichterfelde, Berlin was regularly visited by crowds and well-documented.
Dutch filmmaker Johannes Hogebrink made this unique animation using 145 original photographs of Otto Lilienthal’s historic flights (between 1893 and 1896):
“I quickly gathered all the photographs that I could find and cut them out,” says Hogebrink in his video. “I realized that if you put them in the right sequence, and then take a picture, they would become a movie.”
