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I was just doing some work on Vincent de Groof, which is currently in DYK with the hook that Vincent de Groof successfully tested his bat-like flying machine (pictured) in 1874, only to die after crashing it 10 days later? (my emphasis). The claim that the machine was bat-like, or inspired by a bat, was sourced from [1]; there is no mention of the word "bat" in there, and I have since removed that from the article. On the other hand, the same source says that it was to "imitate the flight of a bird", but which flying machine isn't?

The Wikipedia article started as a translation from the French one, which does include a description that translates to "a kind of glider in the shape of a bat", but it says that this was the machine he used in 1862, not the one in which he died. Regardless, the French article doesn't cite a proper source for this either. Digging deeper, I found this article, which asked the same question in 2022. Upon going through British archives, the author concluded that the "bat"-story seems to have been a contemporary hoax. Compare the illustration from the 1873 newspaper that made the "bat"-claim (linked from that article) with the actual design.

There is no indication that the machine that flew in 1874 had anything to do with bats. Renerpho (talk) 05:24, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I overlooked the one important sentence (the general plan of this apparatus was an imitation of a bat's wings) from the source that was cited. I take back some of what I just wrote, and have self-reverted. However, I think it's still worth looking at this because that source may itself be based on the 1873 newspaper article, and the image in it (together with the fictitious references it provides) shed doubt on the bat-analogy. This image from 1873 (which doesn't resemble the actual machine) is what seems to be the origin of the bat thing, together with a non-existent book Moving Bodies in the Air by a certain Mr Roffley (details here). Renerpho (talk) 05:34, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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