NG Explorer – Confederate Flying Machine (2011)
English | Documentary | Size: 1.27 GB
The history of aviation may never be the same. Forty years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, frantic inventors and engineers rushed to create steam-powered flying machines that they hoped would decide the fate of the Civil War.
Mark Ragan, author and project historian of the Hunley (a Civil War submarine), recently discovered shocking new evidence suggesting that both sides of the conflict were struggling to craft steam-powered flying machines, capable of bombing the enemy.
From the Confederate side, a Civil War inventor R.O. Davidson, a Missisippian scientist ahead of his time believed that his Artis Avis, or “Bird of Art”, a flying machine could save the South. On the Union side, Col. Edward Wellman Serrell, designed a 45 feet tall device called the Serrell Reconoiterer, or the Valomotive, a steam-powered helicopter. Both designers worked on a invention of a steam-powered military flying machine that could bomb the enemy from above-a truly groundbreaking idea at a time when the height of aerial technology was the hot air balloon.
History tells us they never got around to actually building any of these steam weapons, but who knows what war monsters they were secretly working on? If the war had lasted for a few more years, there’s no telling what sort of flying machines the South would have unleashed on their unsuspecting opponents.
Recently uncovered documents from the 1860s provide strong and shocking evidence that, long before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, desperate inventors and engineers imagined steam-powered flying machines that would decide the Civil War. In the early 1860s, A Mississippi Doctor with a passion for birds and an obsession with the idea of manned flight makes a scale model of what he hopes will become the first heavier-than-air war-plane. Tethered to a locomotive, his model becomes airborne. But his requests for funding are rejected by the Virginia Legislature and the Engineering Department, leaving him no choice but to turn to the Confederate soldiers themselves to finance the building of a fleet of these flying machines. While he never raises more than a few hundred dollars before the war ends, it is impossible not to wonder – what if?
Join National Geographic as they unravel the story of Civil War aviation and attempt to build and fly a full-scale 19th century airplane of their own.
Producer/Director: Emily Bernhard ; Produced by Lone Wolf Documentary Group in association with National Geographic Television
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