(excerpted from Aviation's Belle Epoque, by Robert WohlCopyright: 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. ........................................................
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."
