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Louis Blériot, (born
July 1, 1872, Cambrai, France—died Aug. 2, 1936, Paris),
French airplane manufacturer and aviator who made the first flight
of an airplane between continental Europe and Great Britain.
Blériot, a graduate of
the École Centrale in Paris, met and married Alice Vedène
while performing military service as a lieutenant of artillery.
He used his modest fortune, amassed as a manufacturer of headlamps
and other automotive accessories, to fund his earliest work in
aeronautics. Following a series of experiments with a towed glider
on the Seine River, he built and tested a variety of powered
aircraft, ranging from box-kite biplanes to a tail-first (canard)
monoplane. On July 25, 1909, he piloted his Blériot XI,
a monoplane with a 25-horsepower engine, across the English Channel
from Calais, France, to Dover, Eng. This feat won him a prize
of £1,000 offered by the London Daily Mail and resulted
in his emergence as one of the leading aircraft pilots and manufacturers
of the era. |
