Impression Photo Fall of the Flying Man

A terrified man is falling through the sky, desperately clinging to a tangled winged apparatus as the hot-air balloon from which his flying attempt was launched can be seen hovering above. Vincent de Groof was a Belgian shoemaker who styled himself the “Flying Man.” On July 9, 1874, he had his ornithopter launched from a balloon in an attempt to fly across the London sky. He met his death in Robert street (now part of Sydney street). The caption reads in the original French: “Chute de l’homme volant, à Londres.”