LUISE RAINER AND A PHOTOGRAPH

Luise Rainer is celebrating her 102^nd birthday today, 12^th January. Known as The "Viennese Teardrop", she was the first woman to win two Academy Awards, and the first person to win them consecutively. She was discovered by MGM talent scouts while acting on stage in Austria and Germany and after appearing in Austrian films. She is currently the oldest living Academy Award winner. Apparently she lives in London in Belgrave Square, in an apartment in the same building once inhabited by fellow two-time Oscar winner Vivien Leigh.

There is something about the photograph.  My sense of history has clearly been affected by the photograph.  It is a sad realization.  I come to this conclusion as a result of an event which occurred on the 12^th January 1866. On that day The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was founded. Early or founding members included James Glaisher, Francis Wenham, the duke of Argyll, and Frederick Brearey. In the first year, there were 65 members; at the end of the second year, 91 members, and in the third year, 106 members. Annual reports were produced in the first decades. In 1868 the Society held a major exhibition at London's Crystal Palace with 78 entries. The Society sponsored the first wind tunnel in 1870-71, designed by Wenham and Browning. In 1918, the organization's name was changed to the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Giffard

So why does the photograph come into this? I had always thought that the Wright Brothers were credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight, on 17^th December , 1903. There had been other powered flights before that. The first balloon flight in 1793, and the flight by Jules Henri Giffard, the French inventor of the first passenger-carrying powered and steerable airship, called a dirigible, built and flown in 1852; however, the first photograph of a controlled heavier than air powered flight, was that of the Wright brother’s machine on the 17^th December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

First flight of the Wright Flyer, 17th December, 1903, 

Orville piloting, Wilbur running at wingtip.

It was the earlier pioneering stuff by Giffard and others, 51 years earlier, that brought about the founding of the Aeronautical Society in 1866, well before the Kitty Hawk picture. The objectives of Society were to support and maintain high professional standards in aerospace disciplines; to provide a unique source of specialist information and a local forum for the exchange of ideas; and to exert influence in the interests of aerospace in the public and industrial arenas. One should always look beyond the photograph.