AVIATION PIONEER.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 300, 1 December 1936, Page 8

AVIATION PIONEER.

LOUIS BLERIOT’S FEAT, FIRST CHANNEL FLIGHT. THRILL OF 27 YEARS AGO. M. Louis Bierlot, who on Sunday, July 25, 1909, achieved Imperishable’ lame by being Hie first man to Uy the Channel, thereby winning a prize of £LOUO offered by the Daily Mail, died at his home a few weeks ago. Ho was 64 and had been suffering from heart trouble for two years. Many of the younger generation will be unable to appreciate the thrill which Bieriot’s conquest of the Channel by air evoked in the imagination Qi his contemporaries. It seems impossible that it is only 27 vears since his frail little machine of 22 horse-power carried him 30 miles from Calais to a field near Dover. The prize ho won was the first of many offered by the Daily Mall, which’in the pioneer days saw the future in the air when more conservative minds were Inclined to legat’d the air as a risky playground of wealthy engineers.

Brains and Pluck.

This prize did more than anything else to "establish the aeroplane as a serious engineering achievement. Bleriot achieved his success by brains and pluck —the pluck that is nine-tenths doggedness, for he had sore need of doggedness in his long struggle. A Parisian by birth, he was a pupil of the Central School of Engineering at Paris, one of the foremost technical colleges in France. He came into prominence in 1896 as an inventor and maker of one of the first practicable acetylene lamps. A little later he began making aeroplanes, and completed his first full-size model in 1900.

When the Daily Mail offered the prize of £lOOO Bleriot determined to build a machine that would accomplish the flight. One after another he built and oho after another they smashed. When his seventh machine smashed he counted up all that bls experiments had cost him, and was in despair. More than £30,000 had been spent, and he was on the verge of ruin.

Those nearest and dearest to him ifnplored him to give it up, but he felt that he could not stop. Some day he must succeed in finding the' ideal type, and he did at last when he had in hand his monoplane No. XI. At .35 on the Sunday morning he rose in the air and headed for England. For a time he, lost his direction, but eventually the coast of England came into view, and he landed outside Dover at 5.12 a.m.

At the height of Bieriot’s triumph his wife, a tall, portly Frenchwoman with luxurious black tresses, gave this touching account of her husband’s experiments: “There were days when Louis could not sit down a( the table without a pencil. We looked at him, my children and I, and there he was drawing plans on the tablecloth and forgetting his dinner. "Then, suddenly, lie would start explaining to me, with a bewildering wealth of technical details, his various ideas for improving his machine. I can say that for eight years in our home at Neuilly, near Paris, my husband has never spoken to me except about aeroplanes.”

Fifty Accidents.

Il was not until 1926 that Blerlot crossed the Channel again by air, and then he was piloted in a 450 horsepower machine of his own design. On the occasion of his sliver jubilee of his Channel triumph the proprietors of the Dally Mail entertained him to luncheon at the Savoy Hotel, London.

Blerlot met with more than fifty accidents while engaged in flying, but escaped serious injury.