Louis Blériot: From Acetylene Lamps to Crossing the Channel
Louis Blériot is remembered for a single morning in July 1909, when he became the first person to fly an aircraft across the English Channel. This collection tells the longer story behind that flight. Drawn from a contemporary album compiled by the Rol news agency in Paris, Cent instantanés de la vie en aéroplane de Louis Blériot, it follows the French pioneer year by year from 1905 to the Channel crossing, a hundred photographs of one man's stubborn progress from curiosity to history.
The pictures move from the earliest experiments to the triumph. There are the box-kite glider trials towed across the Seine, the floatplanes tested on the Lac d'Enghien, the run of fragile monoplanes built, crashed and rebuilt through 1907 and 1908, the cross-country flights from Toury to Artenay and Étampes to Orléans, and finally the little Blériot XI that carried him to Dover for the Daily Mail prize. Mechanics, crowds and wreckage appear as often as the machines themselves, which is what makes the set so honest a record of how early flying actually happened.
