Albert Robida's Personal Flying Machine Over Paris, c.1890
A daring aeronaut soars above a patchwork landscape aboard a fantastical personal flying machine that resembles a weaponized sewing machine crossed with a glider. The seated pilot, dressed in Victorian attire with a cap, grips the controls of a winged apparatus equipped with a rear propeller, twin pointed booms, and a trailing anchor line. Below, birds wheel over a vast terrain as the craft banks confidently through cloudy skies — pure retro-futurist bravado rendered in exquisite pen-and-ink detail.
Robida at his whimsical best — a one-person contraption that looks simultaneously absurd and plausible, piloted by a Victorian dandy with the calm of a commuter. It lacks raw pulp menace but overflows with the delightful mechanical optimism that made Robida the godfather of steampunk.
