Louis Bleriot at 150
To the townsfolk of Dover, the slightly damaged machine lying in a field behind the impressive stone fortress of Dover Castle was fascinating. It had arrived at 5.17am on July 25, 1909, and at its controls was Frenchman Louis Bleriot. The unassuming man had just entered the history books as the first man to fly across the English Channel in a heavier than air machine.
150 years ago, on July 1, 1872, Bleriot was born in the small town of Cambrai not far from the Belgian border. His school years were uneventful and upon graduation he put his mechanical expertise to good use inventing lamps for the emerging automobile industry. Business was good and a factory followed earning the entrepreneur a healthy living. He invested his money in his other great passion — aviation.
Bleriot’s inventive mind had already seen his create an ornithopter around the turn of the century. An ornithopter is a weird looking contraption with huge wings that flapped violently up and down. Ornithopters are looked on as bizarre through modern eyes, but early aviation experimenters truly believed they offered a serious solution to get man into the air emulating the birds. Bleriot’s machine never left the ground, instead he joined forces with Ernest Archdeacon and the well known Voisin brothers.
Together the four operated a warehouse at Billiancourt building gliders and trying the out on the nearby River Seine. In 1905, Bleriot was proud to have been awarded the very first aviator’s certificate by the newly formed International Aeronautics Federation. The same year also saw the four partners build their first gliding biplane, the Bleriot II. It’s first flight could have ended in tragedy when with Gabriel Voisin at the controls, it soared from the Seine only to dramatically crash into the river again. Voisin was lucky to have been pulled alive from the floating wreckage. The next few years would see Louis Bleriot further develop his designs until in the winter of 1908 he designed and built the Bleriot XI, together with his friend, designer Raymond Saulnier.
Up to this point in his career Louis Bleriot had been derided and ridiculed for his consistent and sometimes spectacular failures. But undeterred by his detractors, Bleriot persisted and pushed ahead with ambitious plans. Remember it had been only five years since Orville Wright had first flown an aircraft at Kitty Hawk. When in May 1908 his brother Wilbur arrived in France to address at crowd at Le Mans, Bleriot was inspired and mesmerised by the Wright A aircraft.
Bleriot watched as the American took his aeroplane into the sky and displayed its manoeuvrability in a series of banks and swoops across the heads of the gathered spectators. Bleriot said afterwards: “For us in France and everywhere, a new era in mechanical flight has commenced. It is marvellous.”
European aviators, following Wilbur Wright’s demonstration flights worked in a much more co-ordinated manner and when Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the London Daily Mail, offered a prize of £1000 to the first person to fly across the English Channel in either direction between the hours of sunrise and sunset Bleriot immediately set to work. He was not alone.
Among his competitors was Comte de Lambert and the debonair Anglo-French Hubert Latham. As July 1909 drew on Comte de Lambert’s interest waned leaving it a two horse race between Bleriot and Latham. Suddenly, Bleriot’s chances of success received a shattering blow when the engine of his Model XI caught fire badly burning Louis Bleriot’s foot. He received hospital treatment resulting in the foot being swathed in bandages. He could only look on enviously as Latham completed the finishing touches to his Antoinette IV design.
Monday July 19, Latham took to the air from Sandgate, near Calais, only to crash land into the English Channel a mere ten minutes later after a faulty engine sent into the water. Having successful extracted himself he sat on the wreckage of his aircraft awaiting rescue.
Latham had to wait for another Antionette VII to arrive before he could make another attempt. Bleriot, meanwhile, in his canvas hanger, a few hundred yards from Latham looked on at his competitors plight.
The morning of Saturday July 24, 1909, proved to be a blustery day with a strong westerly blowing hard along the coast. Far from ideal conditions for early flying machines, but by midnight it was flat calm. At 2.30am Louis Bleriot stepped from his bed in the Terminus Hotel at Calais.
His rival, Latham, had already gone to bed having seen to the arrival and inspection of his new replacement aircraft. He planned to make his second attempt at dawn. His alarm clock was handed to Leon Levasseur with instructions to rouse hi at 3am if the wind seemed suitable.
Louis Bleriot, meanwhile, had dressed in tweeds and a khaki jacket against the chill dawn air. Underneath were his pilot’s blue cotton overalls but most obviously he hobbled to his aircraft with a pair of crutches because of his badly burnt foot. He left the hotel at 3am and drove to Sandgate with his friend M Le Blanc. His rival, meanwhile, decided conditions were not perfect and slept on.
At 3.30am Bleriot and Le Blanc arrived at Baraques. On the way they had stopped to ensure that all was well with the torpedo destroyer Escopette which had been placed at the disposal of the aviators.
At 4am the Bleriot aircraft was prepared for flight while Latham still slumbered. At 10 minutes past four in the morning, Louis Bleriot gave the order for the propeller to be started. With a deep moaning sound, six feet-six inches of walnut began to scythe through the early morning gloom. Bleriot gave the signal to the five-men holding the aircraft to let go and it started out. Moments later it had left the ground to the cheers and applause from the small crowd of early morning spectators. This was, however, just a practice flight of just six-minutes.
At 4.41 the engine was started for the second time. The same procedure was followed as with the practice flight. Bleriot flew his craft half a mile towards Sandgate before turning sharply and swooped over the sand hills cut into the English Channel flying at just 250 feet above the rippling waves. The French Navy’s destroyer Escopette couldn’t keep pace with the rapidly disappearing aeroplane in the mist.
The early morning haze left Bleriot momentarily confused: “I turned my head. Nothing. No destroyer, no England, no France. I am alone. I can see nothing at all — rien du tout!” He kept flying and was rewarded twenty minutes later when he sighted the green of Dover’s fields.
His rival back in France was at that precise moment just getting out of bed.
Thirty-six minutes and 30 seconds after leaving France Bleriot glided on to English soil in the Northfall Meadow, within sight of Dover Castle. History had been made, with barely a single witness. A policeman was the first on the scene, with another pair close behind. A newspaper reporter rushed up to capture the moment. Bleriot’s first reaction to his historic flight was: “The conclusion of my flight overwhelmed me. I had nothing to say. I just accepted the congratulations.”
As for Latham, a contemporary commentator dryly wrote: ‘The man who had undoubtedly led the van with an attempt to cross the Channel was robbed of a splendid chance.’
But, the day belonged to Bleriot, Lord Shackleton, wrote afterwards, ‘Bleriot did not get up in a blaze of trumpets. In the cold, grey dawn of the morning, before the sun had warmed things up, before it had dissipated the dewdrops, he was in our country. It marks a new era in the world.’
Others were not so enthusiastic that a Frenchman had taken the title of first to cross the English Channel, one of them was H.G Wells. “What does that mean for us? One meaning, I think, stands out plainly enough, unpalatable enough to our national pride…Either we are a people essentially and incurably inferior, or there is something wrong in our training, something benumbing in our atmosphere and our circumstances. That it the first and gravest intimation in M. Bleriot’s feat. The second is that, in spite of our fleet, is no longer, from the military point of view, an inaccessible island.”
Louis Bleriot received the Legion d’honneur and became a reluctant national hero. He continued to design and build aircraft for the French Government and civilians and was largely responsible for the development of the Spad fighter of World War One. In 1935 Bleriot closed his factory and suffered a heart attack on 1 August 1936 and died leaving a larger than life legacy.