Flight of the Albatross

by Chris Maddera on February 1, 2006

I’ve been using the image of the man in the flying machine for a few years now. It was part of a clip art book and disc called Transport Pictures on the bargain table at Barnes and Noble and costs me about $5, I think.

I had originally gotten it for another image on the disc, one of an old steam-powered car that looked like a rocket. But as I looked through all the images, one particular image stood out to me, and I knew immediately that I had to use it…somewhere.

It was the perfect image for me: a man in a flying machine. It had Numskullery written all over it. There are at least two kinds of numskullery: The first is truly the low-brow boneheaded stupidity like the kind associated with the current administration; the second is the kind that often involves people daring to think differently, and whose ideas are often criticized by people of the first kind of numskullery. But sometimes, it’s hard to tell the two apart.

And because I thought I would cover both kinds on the blog, the man in the flying machine seemed like the perfect embodiment of stupidity, and intellect and courage often called stupidity by stupid people.

For the past few years, I’ve just thought it was some neat clipart image, but it turns out that the flying machine, called the Albatross, was built in 1856 by a French naval officer, Jean-Marie Le Bris. (I just learned this last night while looking for a different picture of an early flying machine for this post at Deeper Motive).