Historical Events Captured on Photo

This slideshow video on history is not something I usually do but it’s something I’ve been wanting to put together for sometime. Some of the earliest pictures ever made are fascinating such as the last survivors of the American Revolution for example. Before doing this, I didn’t know any of them lived long enough for the camera to be invented and to have their pics taken.

There are lots more interesting pictures out that I was unable to include due to the background music only lasting about 3 minutes. I might possibly feature the other pics and create a ‘part 2’ video sometime in the future.

This was difficult to put together because the size ratio of early 19th century photos was way different than the standard widescreen format videos we have today. After doing some tinkering around in Photoshop I was able to get them to look reasonably nice in the video. I also remove some watermarks and timestamps in some of the photos as well. As I was removing a couple of these watermarks I was starting to get a bit upset. Think about it some of these pics are almost 200 years old and people are claiming ownership in something that clearly isn’t theirs…

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Percy Pilcher – 19th Century Aircraft

I was watching a very interesting documentary a few days ago. Most of us probably don’t have a clue as to who Percy Pilcher is but he was an aviation pioneer during the late 19th century. He built some of the world’s first hang gliders and made a bit of a name for himself at the time. His biggest creation was he was in the process of building the world’s powered aircraft. Unfortunately he died in a crash when demonstrating one of his earlier gliders and never managed to finish the project.

A century later some aviation experts obtained his blue prints and thought the craft had a lot of potential. So they set out to finish his project to see if it would work. If Pilcher had not died in that hang glider accident he could’ve very likely built the world’s first workable aircraft before the Wright Brothers by about several years.

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