On the 5th of October, 1905, Wilbur Wright made his historic flight of 24 miles at Dayton, Ohio, beating the record of Orville, made the day before, of 21 miles. The average speed of these flights was 38 miles an hour. No contention as to the priority of the device known as wing-warping can ever set aside the fact that these long practical flights were made more than a year before any other man had flown 500 feet, or had remained in the air half a minute, with a heavier-than-air machine driven by power. The Wrights are now at the head of one of the largest aeroplane manufactories in the world, and devote the larger part of their time to research work in the line of the navigation of the air. ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT. ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT was born in Brazil in 1877. When but a lad he became intensely interested in aeronautics, having been aroused by witnessing the ascension at a show of an ordinary hot-air balloon. Within the next few years he had made several trips to Paris, and in 1897 made his first ascent in a balloon with the balloon builder Machuron, the partner of the famous Lachambre. In 1898 he began the construction of his notable series of dirigibles, which eventually reached twelve in number. With his No. 6 he won the $20,000 prize offered by M. Deutsch (de la Meurthe) for the first trip from the Paris Aero Club’s grounds to and around the Eiffel Tower in 30 minutes or less. The distance was nearly 7 miles. It is characteristic of M. Santos-Dumont that he should give $15,000 of the prize to relieve distress among the poor of Paris, and the remainder to his mechanicians who had built the balloon. His smallest dirigible was the No. 9, which held 7,770 cubic feet of gas; the largest was the No. 10, which held 80,000 cubic feet. In 1905, when Bleriot, Voisin, and their comrades were striving to accomplish flight with machines heavier than air, Santos-Dumont turned his genius upon the same problem, and on August 14, 1906, he made his first flight with a cellular biplane driven by a 24 horse-power motor. On November 13th of the same year he flew 720 feet with the same machine. These were the first flights of heavier-than-air machines in Europe, and the first public flights anywhere. Later he turned to the monoplane type, and with “La Demoiselle” added new laurels to those already won with his dirigibles. LOUIS BLERIOT. LOUIS BLERIOT, designer and builder of the celebrated Bleriot monoplanes, and himself a pilot of the first rank, was born in Cambrai, France, in 1872. He graduated from a noted technical school, and soon attached himself to the group of young men--all under thirty years of age--who were experimenting with gliders in the effort to fly. His attempts at first were with the flapping-wing contrivances, but he soon gave these up as a failure, and devoted his energy to the automobile industry; and the excellent Bleriot acetylene headlight testifies to his constructive ability in that field.