Author Topic: Artifacts and Originality  (Read 1067 times)

Offline GHE

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Artifacts and Originality
« on: October 09, 2012, 02:39:47 AM »
Messieurs !

The Great War now is as far away to us  as the Napoleonic Wars were to the aviators and their delicate machines we are interested in in this forum.
Since many a man has not caught the history bug a lot of artifacts sadly perished already at their "original" lifetime.
Over here in Europe after WW1 the Dearmament Commissions had to survey the destruction or the sale of German and Austrian
aeroplanes.
The Allies also disarmed ; war is about power and money, ordnance means power and costs  all one's limbs in money and reality
of war theatres.
Many were glad to leave this dark world behind and ordnance would have bitterly reminded them of it, so interest was sometimes small.
The surplus was sold, but in those days big buyers weren't at hand, so the amount of sold machines wasn't this large.
A number of machines was kept for further duty until discarded.
After having been sold or during duty the machines were altered sometimes, modernized and so on.
The chance to find a machine in pristine WW1 condition is small and the number of WW1 machines out of the period 1914-1921
is as small, too .
Some types were surplus-sales and original, but had not seen combat.
In the end what we still find scattered around the globe will in most cases give us at least an impression of size and look but not a  'mint used look' of 1918.
Museums do not always do perfect restaurations. In this sense TVAL may come closer to how it was than for example the Fokker Dr.VII at Deutsches Museum München .
TVAL and all the other replica builders indeed show a great advantage: most of them are airworthy !
Aeroplanes belong to that element  'the air' and their beauty  'deploys' above our raised heads .
Our small kit replicas may come closer , too and with the help of imagination we may let them fly.
A good digital movie even may give us a feeling "for how it was" then.

I love history and artifacts open up a whole world to mind and heart.
It is worth a lot to show unfaked artifacts, but we shan't be too sad that in reality we will not have dozens of 100% original
aeroplanes around the world.
Astonishing to me is the fact that in a world of mass-production the mass-product seems to perish as fast as it is produced.
Mass production society caught up with war. The worth of a 'single' item or man declined.
This became Europe's 20th century tragedy.

viele Grüße, Gunther

« Last Edit: October 17, 2012, 03:01:52 AM by GHE »
LZeppelin rocks!