HOUDINI TAKES FLIGHT

This blurry 1910 footage - shot, we believe, by his assistant Franz Kukol - documents Harry Houdini's becoming the first man to fly in Australia.

State Library of Victoria

Melbourne Argus

Houdini flies his Voisin in Australia, 1910

By the time he set this record, he was one of the most experienced flyers in the whole world. When he first flew, in Germany in 1908, he was only the twenty-fifth man ever to do so. 

Houdini with air team, Hamburg, Germany 1909

Harry performed in San Antonio, Texas in 1916, for an audience including members of the First Aero Squadron, the ancestor of today's US Air Force. At that moment, Harry had more flying time than the entire US military aviation corps combined!

Exactly 105 years ago this week, Houdini's friend, confidant and flight engineer, Montraville Wood, became one of the first to teach the U.S. military how to fly. Houdini's 1911 diaries include photos of Wood teaching notorious Army aviator Paul Beck how to fly a Curtiss bi-plane with a 2000-pound sidestrain corrected by Wood's brilliant invention: the airborne gyroscope.

San Antonio, Texas, April 17, 1911

Beck went on to become the first man in military history to drop a bomb.

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[Images: The Aero, Google]