Louis Bleriot's Pioneering Channel Crossing

(excerpted from Aviation's Belle Epoque, by Robert Wohl
Copyright: Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine, April/May 1996)

Late in the summer of 1908, on a racetrack near the French city of Le Mans, Wilbur Wright climbed into his Flyer to show a disbelieving nation that his machine did indeed fly. Wright's long-term goal was the establishment of Wright-licensed factories in France, but his demonstration flights had another effect altogether: They set the French to creating their own aircraft industry at a giddy pace.

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Wright's fame in France, however, was destined to be more fleeting than Prade or Wright himself could have imagined, in large part because of critical decisions he made in the aftermath of his triumphant flights in 1908 and 1909. An aviation enthusiast who had traveled to France to see Wright fly, Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the widely read newspaper the Daily Mail and one of the most powerful men in England, offered a prize of 1,000 pounds ($5,000) for the first flight across the English Channel. Northcliffe tried to interest Wright in the exploit, privately guaranteeing him a $7,500 bonus on top of the public prize and half the net receipts from the exhibition of the Flyer in London. Wright was briefly tempted, but he demurred because of Orville's fear that the Flyer's engine was not reliable enough to make the Channel crossing and his own belief that "exceptional feats" were ill suited to the image of inventor that he was determined to cultivate for himself and his brother.

In the spring of 1909, after satisfying his contractual obligations to train selected Frenchmen and Italians to fly the Wright machine, Wilbur returned to the U.S. and devoted himself primarily to his business affairs. The aviator would increasingly give way to the capitalist, a change that did not sit well with Wright's admirers, not to mention his critics. It also opened a window of opportunity for the French.

With Wright out of the running for the Daily Mail prize, the favorite was Hubert Latham, a wealthy sportsman and man-about-town who had only recently learned to fly. Piloting a graceful Antoinette IV monoplane designed by the rotund engineer Leon Levavasseur, Latham took off on July 19 and was seven miles out to sea when his 50-horsepower water-cooled V-8 engine died. Unable to restart it, Latham glided down and alighted on the water, where a French destroyer escort found him a few minutes later, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette. When he arrived in Calais to a hero's welcome, Latham announced his determination to try again: "The Channel will be conquered. I'm starting over and I will succeed."

The Channel would indeed be conquered, but not by the debonair Latham. His place in history would be usurped by a dour French aviator and aircraft designer in blue coveralls. At daybreak on July 25, 1909, Louis Bleriot succeeded in making the 23-mile crossing to Dover in 37 minutes despite his overheating 25-horsepower Anzani engine. The sight of ships steaming toward port had alerted him to change his heading, which was taking him toward the North Sea.

The French press immediately interpreted Bleriot's exploit as a triumph of the monoplane--a French solution to flight--over Wright's American biplane, which, it was now remembered, had the additional defect of having to be catapulted into the air by means of a cumbersome derrick and rail. In the aftermath of the flight, while Bleriot was being celebrated in London and Paris by huge crowds, orders for his flying machine, the Bleriot XI, which was in large part designed by engineer Raymond Saulnier, began to arrive in droves. (Selling price in the United States was $850 assembled, plus $1,000 for an engine.) It would become one of the most popular aircraft of the pre-war period and would consecrate the reign of the monoplane. Favored by air racers, monoplanes proved speedier than biplanes, provided greater visibility, and were cheaper to maintain. But the monoplane's notorious instability and higher landing speeds produced a lengthy list of aviators who died at its controls. (In 1912, the French army grounded all Bleriots after numerous fatalities caused by inflight wing failure, and England's Royal Flying Corps went so far as to ground all monoplanes.)

The French had further reason to celebrate their aeronautical achievements the following September at the conclusion of the great airshow at Rheims, which attracted 500,000 spectators, many of them dignitaries from France and abroad. Though Glenn Curtiss edged out Bleriot in the 12-mile Gordon Bennett race, Bleriot set a world speed record for a single lap--47.84 mph--and French aviators dominated all other events. Latham in particular dazzled the audience by ascending to an extraordinary 508 feet in his delicate dragonfly-like Antoinette monoplane, winning the altitude prize and leaving spectators with the impression that he was about to disappear in the sky. One awestruck German journalist wrote that it was a "picture more beautiful in its harmonic forms than one can imagine."

Read the full article here:

http://www.airandspacemagazine.com/ASM/Mag/Index/1996/AM/avbe.html

(excerpted from Scareships Over Britain: The Airship Wave of 1909,
 by Dr David Clarke)

"It was realised...that as soon as an efficient flying machine made its appearance England lay open to an invasion from the air, that her traditional reliance upon the Navy and seapower was no longer so valid as it had been in what was looked upon as the dawn of a new age, the air age. As one contemporary expressed it....'England is no longer an island.'"

Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984) [1].

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On 25 July 1909, the pioneer aeronaut Louis Bleriot made history by becoming the first pilot to cross the English Channel in a rickety monoplane. The 37-minute flight won a £1,000 prize offered by Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the London Daily Mail, to the first man to cross the Channel in powered flight. The huge significance of Bleriot's achievement was recognised by Northcliffe who proclaimed on the front page of his newspaper the words "England is no longer an island."  The Channel crossing marked the culmination of six years of rapid technological advances which had begun with the first flight by the Wright Brothers, and triggered a race to perfect a practical flying machine from which there was no turning back.
Bleriot's flight marked the high point of a feverish summer in which the public had been gripped with aerial hysteria and fear of invasion from foreign hordes. The year 1909 saw the realisation that the British Navy's world-wide supremacy was directly under threat, and for the first time in its history the island was vulnerable to invasion from the air. Bleriot may well have been the first to cross the Channel, but just two months before his flight newspapers had suggested that the Channel had been crossed secretly, and at night, by a far more sinister aircraft - the German Zeppelin airship. In the spring of 1909 Germany's prototype airships were incapable of night reconnaissance operations over the British Coast. And yet, during four months that spring, several hundred eyewitnesses claimed to have seen "phantom Zeppelins" moving across the night sky, performing manoeuvres which were impossible for any contemporary airship or aeroplane of the day. In addition, a number of people claimed to have seen this mysterious airship at close range, hearing its whirring engines and observing its cigar-shaped gasbag and dazzling searchlight. A few even claimed to have seen and conversed with its crew. Although few of these claims were taken seriously, just six years later the first air raids, led by Zeppelins, would be launched against East Anglia, bringing the hitherto fictional horror of bombing to the very heart of England.
The phantom airship sightings, dubbed by some commentators as "scareships", were largely ridiculed by the Press. But they contributed to the growing demand by British patriots for more resources to be spent upon a military aircraft for defence against the Zeppelin threat. These demands reached fresh heights during the winter of 1912-1913, which coincided with a second airship scare. These outbreaks of hysteria have been largely ignored by historians who have studied the period immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. As a result, these fascinating scares have been researched by writers of UFO literature, who have compared the observations with modern 'flying saucer' phenomena. This article is an attempt to reconcile these two differing approaches to the subject, and set the scare in its correct sociological context with the use of original source material.

Read the full article here:

http://www.ufo.se/english/articles/wave.html

(excerpted from Pioneer Pilots by Xi Lubbs)

In 1908 Lord Northcliffe offered a prize of £1000 to the first man who would fly across the English Channel. Over a year passed before the first attempt was made. On July 19th, 1909, in the early morning, Hubert Latham took off from the French coast in his plane the 'Antoinette IV'. He had traveled only seven miles across the Channel when his engine failed and he was forced to land on the sea. The 'Antoinette' floated on the water until Latham was picked up by a ship.

Two days later, Louis Bleriot arrived near Calais with a plane called 'No. XI'. Bleriot had been making planes since 1905 and this was his latest model. A week before, he had completed a successful overland flight during which he covered twenty-six miles. Latham, however did not give up easily. He, too, arrived near Calais on the same day with a new 'Antonette'. It looks as if there would be an exciting race across the Channel. Both planes were going to take off on July 25th, but Latham failed to get up early enough. After making a short test flight at 4.15 a.m., Bleriot set off half an hour later. His great flight lasted thirty seven minutes. When he landed near Dover, the first person to greet him was a local policeman. Latham made another attempt a week later and got within half a mile of Dover, but he was unlucky again. His engine failed and he landed on the sea for the second time.