After meeting Viscount Ponton d’Amécourt, a fervent promotor of the propeller, which he believed would enable "rising into the air and steering with heavier-than-air craft," Félix Nadar founded the “Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion via Heavier than Air Craft.” Prototypes of Ponton d'Amécourt's "spiralifers," or miniature helicopters, were displayed in Nadar's studio alongside his "Manifesto for Aerial Autolocomotion" on July 30, 1863.

"It is the propeller, the sacred propeller! - as an illustrious mathematician told me the other day - that will lift us into the air; the propeller, which penetrates the air like a drill bit bites into wood, drawing behind it, in one case an engine, in the other, a shaft."
Félix Nadar, in Memoires of the Géant: On the Ground and in the Air, 1864, p. 136
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