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Aviation History
1949
1949 - 1307.PDF
. *=;• The Bleriot monoplane, with its maker standing in the cockpit, is wheeled to the starting-point. A few minutes later he asked the question below "Where is Dover?*' ,•«"•••• —asked Louis Bleriot at Calais 40 years ago : A Personal Recollection of an Epoch-making FlightIT was on a windy summer's morning, just 40 years ago, that I found myself perched some- what precariously on the roof of a building not far from Calais. In my hand I held a portable tele- phone. The line communicated with a room below in which was an opera- tor of the Marconi Company with all his gear, while just outside, on the cliff, stood a tall pole carrying an aerial. This wireless station on the French coast—for the erection of which we had to gain the special permission of the'French Govern- ment—and a similar one in the Lord Warden Hotel, Dover, were the first to be operated in connec- By HARRY HARPER "DLERIOT'S monoplane was the 11th ofthe series he had built. Leading dimen- sions were : span, 28ft. ; chord, 6ft. ;length, 25ft. ; all-up weight, 71S lb ; wing loading, 3J9 lb/sq.ft. Control was bywing-warping, an orthodox rudder, and " elevating tips " at the tailplane ends. Its 24 h.p. " fan-type " three-cylinderair-cooled Anzani engine had automatic inlet valves and mechanical exhaust valvessupplemented by auxiliary exhaust ports. The crossing was made at a speedof about 4S m.p.h., in a wind of variable direction which blew initially at aboutlOkt, fell light in mid-Channel (where the pilot was out of sight of land) and gustedto 20kt at Dover. The author of this article justifiablyclaims to be "the first air-news reporter'. tion with a pioneer aeroplane flight. Below me on the sand-dunes, adjoining the little village of Les Baraques, was a tent from which a small monoplane was being towed, and into this machine, as I watched, climbed the Frenchman who, within the next hour, was to write his name on history by what, as one newspaper put it dramatically, was "the flight that changed the world." That small aircraft on which I was looking down was none other than the famous little 24 h.p. monoplane in which its designer, constructor and pilot, the redoubtable Louis Bleriot, was just about to set off on the then perilous adventure of an attempt to cross the Channel by aeroplane be- tween Calais and Dover. From my vantage-point, on that never-to-be-forgotten morning of July 25th, 1909, I 'phoned down to the Marconi man below brief word- pictures of the scene I was watching —how Bleriot was now seated in his cockpit; how his little three- cylinder air-cooled Anzani motor was being run up, and how the airman was now just taking-off on a trial flight. Actually, what I did up there (although I did not realize it at the time) was to give the first of all outside wireless broadcasts, for what I was saying was immediately wirelessed across to Dover, and from there went straight on by 'phone to newspaper offices in London. I had been five weeks on the French coast prior to that history-making morning. Three competitors had entered the field in attempts to win the J£I,OOO prize Lord North- cliffe had offered for the first heavier-than-air craft to cross the Channel. The Comte de Lambert, coming to Wissant with a Wright biplane, had crashed in a trial flight and
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