The success of this great meeting brought about a host of imitations
of which only a few deserve bare mention since, unlike the first, they
taught nothing and achieved little. There was the meeting at Boulogne
late in September of 1909, of which the only noteworthy event was
Ferber’s death. There was a meeting at Brescia where Curtiss again took
first prize for speed and Rougier put up a world’s height record of 645
feet. The Blackpool meeting followed between 18th and 23rd of October,
1909, forming, with the exception of Doncaster, the first British
Flying Meeting. Chief among the competitors were Henry Farman, who took
the distance prize, Rougier, Paulhan, and Latham, who, by a flight in a
high wind, convinced the British public that the theory that flying
was only possible in a calm was a fallacy. A meeting at Doncaster was
practically simultaneous with the Blackpool week; Delagrange, Le Blon,
Sommer, and Cody were the principal figures in this event. It should
be added that 130 miles was recorded as the total flown at Doncaster,
while at Blackpool only 115 miles were flown. Then there were Juvisy,
the first Parisian meeting, Wolverhampton, and the Comte de Lambert’s
flight round the Eiffel Tower at a height estimated at between 1,200
and 1,300 feet. This may be included in the record of these aerial
theatricals, since it was nothing more.
Probably wakened to realisation of the possibilities of the aeroplane
by the Rheims Meeting, Germany turned out its first plane late in 1909.
It was known as the Grade monoplane, and was a blend of the Bleriot
and Santos-Dumont machines, with a tail suggestive of the Antoinette
type. The main frame took the form of a single steel tube, at the
forward end of which was rigged a triangular arrangement carrying the
pilot’s seat and the landing wheels underneath, with the wing warping
wires and stays above. The sweep of the wings was rather similar to the
later Taube design, though the sweep back was not so pronounced, and
the machine was driven by a four-cylinder, 20 horse-power, air-cooled
engine which drove a two-bladed tractor propeller. In spite of
Lilienthal’s pioneer work years before, this was the first power-driven
German plane which actually flew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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