Louis Blériot

French aviator

• Born: July 1, 1872
• Birthplace: Cambrai, France
• Died: August 2, 1936
• Place of death: Paris, France

Blériot completed the first overseas flight in a heavier-than-air craft in 1909 and later became a pioneer in the fledgling aeronautics industry. He played a critical role in the French war effort during World War I and the subsequent establishment of commercial aviation.

Early Life

The childhood years of Louis Blériot (lwee blay-ree-oh) and the infancy of aviation go together. In other times, Blériot, the son of a local merchant in Cambrai, might have contented himself with a business career. He supplemented a basic education in the French system with a deep practical intuition that earned for him quick success in the business world. By the time Blériot was thirty, he had amassed a modest fortune in manufacturing as a leading producer of headlights and other accessories for the rapidly growing automobile industry. Blériot’s first love, however, was always aviation, and once independently wealthy he developed what started as a hobby into a lifelong avocation.

Many governments were slow to realize the possibilities of military and civil aviation; not so the French. Almost from the moment that Wilbur and Orville Wright successfully flew a heavier-than-air craft at Kitty Hawk in December, 1903, French military officers in the diplomatic corps, as well as journalists and amateur aviators, inundated the country with information. Shortly after their epochal achievement, the Wright brothers themselves went to France to demonstrate their technology to an enthralled government and public.

Blériot was among many Europeans for whom Kitty Hawk seized the imagination. As early as 1899, he had experimented with flying machines, including an ungainly and unsuccessful device called an ornithopter, which tried to mimic the flapping wings of birds. He corresponded actively with the Wrights and other experimenters.

Blériot’s earliest successful flight tests in 1907 were with gliders towed by power boats on the Seine River, near Paris. Their design immediately revealed Blériot’s pragmatism and imagination. The gliders imitated the biplane and forward elevator configuration used by the Wrights but also kept the box-kite-like tail assembly preferred in Europe. The result was an aircraft as maneuverable as the early Wright machines but much more stable. Blériot also exhibited an early preference for aircraft launched from water rather than land, a penchant followed by many other European aviation pioneers.

Blériot’s first original aircraft design was a leap into the unknown: a monoplane equipped with large forward wings, an enclosed fuselage, and a tail assembly with rudder, elevators, and ailerons. This formula would become fundamental to virtually all aircraft designs in the twentieth century. It was, however, somewhat ahead of the times. Blériot’s monoplane crashed on its fifth test hop. Nevertheless, despite widespread criticism of his radical designs, Blériot persisted. Among the few who encouraged such daring were Gabriel and Charles Voisin, generally recognized as the leading authorities on aviation in France at the time.

Life’s Work

Blériot acquired worldwide fame in 1908 and 1909, when he recorded a pair of spectacular breakthroughs. In the early years of flight, philanthropists and newspaper publishers prodded aviators with trophy cups and cash prizes for specific achievements. On October 31, 1908, Blériot captured a prize of five hundred pounds sterling for the first successful round-trip flight, with landings, between two prearranged points the French towns of Toury and Artenay which were a bare fourteen kilometers apart.

In 1909, the London Daily Mail offered a prize of one thousand pounds for the first person to pilot a heavier-than-air craft across the English Channel; in other words, to complete the first and about the shortest possible overseas flight across open water. Several aviators already had tried the Channel and failed, but Alfred Harmsworth, the visionary patron of the Daily Mail’s prize offer, wanted to convince colleagues in the British government that aircraft would soon change the character of European geopolitics.

Blériot made his Channel crossing on July 28, 1909, in Monoplane 11, which he designed and built himself. It was a spidery craft with an engine that produced barely twenty-five horsepower. Taking off from a field outside Calais, Blériot landed in England, near Dover, after about a thirty-minute flight. His aircraft flew a modest eighty meters or so above the water and averaged just over 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) per hour. Perhaps the most breathtaking aspect of the brief flight was that Blériot, relying only on dead reckoning, became the first human being to pilot a heavier-than-air craft out of sight of land: for ten minutes.

Blériot’s Channel crossing, modest though it seems in the annals of flight, electrified Europe. It meant that, in the future, England would no longer be insulated from Europe by the Channel. (Legend has it that the British government did not immediately sense this; Blériot contends that he was met at the field in England by a customs officer who merely asked him if he had anything to declare.) The plodding pace of Monoplane 11 cut by half the crossing time of the fastest mailboat; perhaps more ominously, it left its French destroyer escort far behind. The Channel crossing showed that aircraft engines were light and powerful enough, leading to dreams of even more daring ventures.

The broad enthusiasm for aviation symbolized by Blériot’s achievement led briefly to the emergence of France as the world leader in the field. The government bestowed on Blériot the Cross of the Legion of Honor. It sponsored the first international air meet at Reims in 1909, where, although Blériot had engine trouble, French aviators reaped awards and set many new speed and distance records.

World War I was the first international conflict in which aircraft played a significant role, and Blériot became deeply involved in the French war effort. When the war began in 1914, lighter-than-air vehicles were still masters of the skies. The first reconnaissance craft designed by Blériot differed little from Monoplane 11. At first, these aircraft were not even armed. The French pilots had instructions to ram German zeppelins headed for the front, but it is doubtful whether they had the speed or power necessary to catch the dirigibles.

During the war, Blériot submitted design after design to the French government, yet technology was moving rapidly beyond the perspective of individual inventors, and his greatest success in military aviation came after joining forces with a team of experts. One result was the famous SPAD fighter, the equal of anything in its class for the duration of the conflict.

After World War I, Blériot’s interest returned to commercial aviation. Although large companies increasingly dominated the development and utilization of aircraft in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Blériot never lost his admiration for individual achievement, even as it reduced his once awe-inspiring flight across the English Channel to relative insignificance. When Charles A. Lindbergh landed at Orly Field outside Paris on May 21, 1927, having completed the world’s first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, Blériot was there with a French delegation to receive him. Nor did his vision for the future know any bounds. In 1931, Blériot himself offered a cash prize for the first supersonic aircraft, years in advance of any such prototype.

Blériot’s own designs also continued to be at the forefront of commercial aviation. In August, 1933, he shipped a giant monoplane to New York to attempt from there a new world distance record. Loaded with some seven thousand liters of fuel, the aircraft, like Lindbergh’s much smaller Spirit of St. Louis, had such large tanks that there was no forward vision: The pilot had to use mirrors to take off and land. This behemoth of the times completed a record nonstop flight from New York to Rayak, Syria, a distance of more than 6,250 kilometers (3,885 miles). Blériot died in August, 1936, in Paris.

Significance

Blériot belonged to a generation of daredevils and tinkerers who made heavier-than-air aviation a practical reality. He flourished at a time when accumulating knowledge about powered flight was in the public domain, and the applications of that knowledge were widely acclaimed. Thus, Blériot and others could innovate quickly, using the work of recent predecessors. The technological challenges of early aviation were amenable to the solutions of pragmatists and often yielded to intuition.

Blériot was a leader, even among these early pioneers who usually were eager to share their knowledge, in disseminating as widely as possible not only the technology of aviation but also the basic knowledge of flying skills accumulated by trial and error. Aviators all over the world, including the United States, got their start in the flying schools he established in more than one dozen countries.

Blériot’s early career also demonstrates the level of risk involved in aircraft development. Generally, he and his colleagues flight-tested their own designs. Blériot himself was in more than fifty accidents, including a near-fatal crash in 1907 and one in which his aircraft plunged through the roof of a building during a demonstration in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). During his epic flight across the English Channel, Blériot was in serious pain from leg burns received in a gasoline explosion only the previous day. Blériot’s bravery and imagination, as much as the engines on his aircraft, powered the early development of aviation.

Bibliography

Collier, Basil. A History of Air Power. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974. Broad, incisive coverage of aviation technology, especially interrelationships between military and commercial developments.

Elliott, Brian A. Blériot: Herald of an Age. Stroud, England: Tempus, 2000. Comprehensive biography, including accounts of Blériot’s flight over the English Channel and his airplane manufacturing business.

Gollin, Alfred M. No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984. An important study that places Blériot’s Channel crossing in broader historical perspective. Gollin shows that British concern over the potential of aircraft to alter strategic planning began very early, and that Blériot’s achievement had a much greater public impact because there was already open debate in Great Britain about the implications of air power.

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., ed. The American Heritage History of Flight. New York: American Heritage, 1962. Typical of many general histories of aviation organized to emphasize the overall development of industry and technology rather than the careers of individuals.

McFarland, Marvin W., ed. The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright. 2 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. Volume 2, covering the period from 1906 to 1948, contains numerous references to Blériot, suggestive of how closely early aviators followed the exploits of their colleagues.

Michaels, Daniel. “Wing and a Prayer: A Ninety-Three-Year-Old Plane Still Flies Sort Of.” The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2002, p. A1. Feature article on Blériot XI, the world’s oldest plane that still can fly. Includes information on Blériot’s construction of the aircraft.

Sunderman, James F., ed. Early Air Pioneers, 1862-1935. New York: Franklin Watts, 1961. Deals with the careers of many early aviators, arranged so that the interconnections among these figures are stressed. Particularly useful for its international perspective on technological developments.

Taylor, John W. R., and Kenneth Munson. History of Aviation. London: New English Library, 1972. Heavily illustrated and detailed accounts both of major milestones in the history of flight and of contributors to early aviation. One of the best organized sources of biographical accounts.