Sighted!

Well what do you know, the damn thing actually existed!
Above is an 1868 photo of the Albatros Two, the real life counterpart to my blog's brittle mascot flying machine (see masthead, at top). Designed and built by French aviator Jean-Marie Le Bris, it was the second and less sucessful Albatros, although it was the first flying machine ever photographed. Albatros One is on record as having gone airborn in December 1856 to a height of about three hundred feet, for a distance of six hundred feet, making it a contender for first heavier-than-air craft to lift higher than its point of departure (will have to review what the criteria for actual flight is, since Orville and Wilbur Wright still hold the distinction of official First Flyers in December of 1903). Albatros Two didn't fare nearly as well, despite the support of the French Navy in its production and the addition of a few supposed "improvements" in its design.

At first I was delighted, well, jazzed, actually, to discover the Albatros when I was researching the celebrated Parisian photographer Nadar (he took the picture); but I soon realized I preferred the jaunty little flying machine when it was just a bit of whimsy, kith and kin to the likes of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or the obligingly psychedelic Yellow Submarine. I find instead that the Albatros was patented, tested, sweated over, and most likely cursed and abused in the end. In other words, not exactly "Hokum."

We're all at least a little disappointed when the blurry but uncanny monster photo turns out to be a hoax, or at best a case of wishful thinking. But feelings can be a bit more complicated when the reverse happens and the myth is revealed as fact. Schliemann's Troy and Layard's Nineveh were of course astounding archaelogical discoveries in their time, bringing Homeric antiquity and Biblical scripture to life, respectively; yet I can't help but feel that all the excitement must have been tempered by some small sense of loss, as the collective imagination yielded up its treasures to the cold light of day.

You could say that my old bit of hokum has become, for now, a bit of an Albatros around my neck.