The developement of aviation is a long list of steps leading to the flyable planes we know today. The video is showing a number of those steps.
My flight pioneer heros are Alberto Santos-Dumont and Louis Bleriot.
Alberto Santos-Dumont did his first flight in 1906 and developed several of the earliest planes. While the Wrights needed a catapult to start, his plane started on its own. The Wrights where in the lead from 1903-1908 in flying and controling a plane in the air but the contribution to the development was small. They kept everything in secret and they spend most of the time after 1905 with filing patents and suing the competition.
Alberto Santos-Dumont was completely different. He wanted to fly and he was proud to share his results with the other pioneers. When he build his first plane to be produced in small series (the Demoiselle), he gave away the construction plans for free. The more the better, no matter who is building them.
Bleriot needed a number of attemts until he finaly came up with the Bleriot XI. This plane made it over the channel in 1909, a 35km flight. After this flight he started to produce the plane in larger numbers. About 800 where build during the next years. This was probably the most important step from a few pioneers flying their own contruction to a plane everybody could buy to fly around just for fun. It took just three years from Santos Dumonts first hop to a plane with a price tag, produced in the hundreds. In 1911 air races went from Paris to Madrid and Rome.
I think this development is simply amazing and it was only possible because people like Santos Dumont and Bleriot where more interestet in leaning from each other than protecting interlectual property and patents.
When the USA entered WWI in 1917, the patent war between the Wrights and Glenn Curtis had stopped the developement so effective, that the US had to use french planes because no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wri...ers_patent_war