This Mechanical Age is a 1954 American short documentary film about the early days of aviation, produced by Robert Youngson. In 1955, it won an Oscar for Best Short Subject [One-Reel] at the 27th Academy Awards
Having recently watched Disney’s “Water Birds” (1952) it is probably fair to say that not everything that actually makes it up into the sky looks like it was born so to do. Here, though, we look at a range of man-made contraptions that had about as much chance of getting airborne as the Eiffel Tower
... . Using everything from bicycle power to steam and even feathers, this ten minute sojourn through aviation’s pioneering calamities pitches together an amiable narration with quite an astonishing array of archive footage of some of the most ridiculous of devices that could ever have been inspired by Da Vinci a mere four centuries earlier. It is a quickly paced edit emphasising the silliness, so don’t go looking for any serious scientific underpinning of it’s purpose - even though one machine that hovered for a few seconds did, at least, have a semblance of a helicopter to it. You will probably have seen some of the images before, but this is still a decently put together compendium of designers with lead boots.
