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 Louis Blériot was a French engineer and aircraft designer
who flew the first motorized aircraft across the English Channel and headed a
successful aircraft company, the Société Pour Aviation et ses Derives
(SPAD).
Early Career
Louis Charles-Joseph Blériot was born in Cambria, France
on July 1, 1872. He studied engineering at the École Centrale Paris and graduated with a
degree in Arts and Trades. Though best remembered for his flying machines,
Blériot began his career by designing automobile headlights. He amassed a small
fortune during his youth, but decided to devote his life's work to aviation
after attending a local exhibition in 1901. Captivated by Clement Ader's
bat-wing flying machine, Blériot first built a motorized ornithopter, a
bird-like craft that was designed to fly by flapping its wings. Blériot's idea
was as old as Icarus, the character from Greek mythology who flew too close to
the sun, but the result – failure – was very much the same.
The Blériot-Voisin
Company
In 1903, Louis Blériot joined forces with Gabriel Voisin,
another young aircraft designer, to form Europe's
first commercial aircraft manufacturing business. Although the Blériot-Voisin
company was short-lived, the duo developed first a floatplane glider and then a
motorized biplane. The inventors clashed frequently, however, and Gabriel Voisin
bought out Louis Blériot's share of the business in 1906. While Voisin reformed
the company with help from his brother Charles, Blériot started work on his own
designs. He also taught himself to fly and served as his own test pilot.
Blériot's first plane crash in 1907 was the first of many brushes with injury
and death. Of the first 10 aircraft that he built, only one could sustain
flight for more than 10 minutes.
Trial and Error
 Unlike the Wright Brothers, Louis Blériot worked mainly by
trial and error, rejecting a more systematic approach in favor of experimenting
with various designs. After ending his partnership with Gabriel Voisin, Blériot
built gliders, box-kite biplanes, and finally monoplanes. Although some
historians credit Trajan Vui, a Romanian inventor, as the inventor of the first
monoplane, others describe Louis Blériot as "the father of the modern
airplane". In 1907 – the year after Vui flew a monoplane 40 feet – Blériot made
a short hop in a canard-style aircraft (right) at Bagatelle,
France. The
French engineer later extended his monoplane's wingspan to 16.5 ft., but a
crash on April 19, 1907 left the aircraft damaged beyond repair.
The Legendary Blériot
XI
 By 1908, Louis Blériot had spent most of the money he had
amassed while working as an automotive engineer. He had also squandered most of
his wife's inheritance. According to legend, Alicia Blériot saved her husband's
aviation career by rescuing a boy who was about to fall off the balcony of a Paris apartment building.
As luck would have it, the boy's father was a wealthy man who demonstrated his
appreciation by offering to fund Louis Blériot's latest experiment, a monoplane
called the Blériot XI. While this story may sound suspect, the engineer's
interest in using the Blériot XI to win a thousand-pound prize was very real.
The contest, a 22-mile flight over ocean waters, would also secure Blériot a
place in aviation history.
On July 25, 1909, Louis Blériot made the first flight across
the English Channel in a heavier-than-air machine, traveling from Les Barraques, France
to Dover, England in 36.5 minutes. The wooden
aircraft that Blériot landed near Dover
Castle upset Britain's sense
of aerial invincibility and netted the French inventor a large sum of money
from the London Daily Mail, the newspaper
which had sponsored the cross-channel contest. News of the French flier's success
also stoked demand for the Blériot XI. At the request of his wife Alicia, Louis
Blériot agreed to abandon competitive flying and focus on restoring the family's
fortunes. By the end of 1909, the inventor had founded a factory which built "Channel
crossing type" airplanes at a cost of £400. Blériot also licensed his winning design
to several foreign firms.
When World War I began in 1914, Louis Blériot turned his Société
Pour Aviation et ses Derives (SPAD) into one of France's leading manufactures of
combat aircraft. During this "war to end all wars", SPAD built more than 5,600
aircraft for France and
exported hundreds more to Great
Britain and other Allied countries.
Louis Blériot died on August 2, 1936.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Bl%C3%A9riot
http://www.earlyaviators.com/ebleriot.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bl%C3%A9riot_V
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Prehistory/Cayley/PH2.htm
http://www.memagazine.org/supparch/flight03/goldage/goldage.html
http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/bleriot.html
http://www.flyingmachines.org/ader.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithopter
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