An Animated History Of Aviation: From da Vinci’s Sketches to Apollo 11

It starts with Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s famous sketch­es of fly­ing machines, then moves to the first hot air bal­loon launched by the Mont­golfi­er broth­ers in 1783, the glid­ers cre­at­ed by Sir George Cay­ley (1804), and the Wright broth­ers’ first flight at Kit­ty Hawk in 1903. These great moments and oth­ers all get cov­ered in this Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Avi­a­tion, an ele­gant lit­tle film pro­duced by Utah Val­ley Uni­ver­si­ty, a col­lege with a large avi­a­tion pro­gram of its own. We’ll add it to our col­lec­tion of Great Sci­ence Videos.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!