[2] The film was thought to be lost for many years, until it was found inside a Mutoscope that was in a room of the Museu Paulista of the University of São Paulo (USP).
The only informative reference found in the Museum's collection, besides an episodic mention of a lost cut from Jornal de Notícias, was the record in the donation inventory (1935) of the family of Santos Dumont, which classifies the piece as a "cinematographic wheel".
[2] Through the crossing of excavated data and extensive consultations with Paul C. Spehr, retired curator of the Library of Congress in Washington and an expert on early cinema, it was possible to identify the film that originated the reel of photographs found at the Museu Paulista: Spehr reported that his notes on the projection of the film-mutoscope of Santos Dumont came from a research by Luke McKernan, a British early cinema researcher, on the exhibition programs of the Palace Theatre in London.
[6] In short, after extensive research, it was confirmed that it was a mutoscope, a device that displayed in a loop, to an individual viewer, a series of small photographs reproduced from 68mm film and loaded onto a metal reel.
[8] Carlos Adriano classified the restored film as a "singular object from the beginning of cinema, with no equivalence in Brazilian history", calling it "the rare moving record of Santos Dumont".